girdled

As long as a tree is not girdled — cut entirely around its circumference, severing all the vascular tissue — it will continue to live.

Behind the Holms’ house, two miles from downtown Louisville, the deck looks over a large trampoline, girdled with a safety net.

There, on 200 acres in southwestern Montana, in a glorious area girdled by mountains known as Paradise Valley, nature beckons and soothes.

One is draped with casts of little squashes; another, girdled in a taut membrane with the texture of ostrich skin; a third filled with a single, multipart inflatable cushion.

Pus-yellow pools girdled her scabbed nose, and her swollen lips were fenced with mean rows of brackish stitches.