Pruning

[neverspent]

I pruned fruit trees yesterday. I had been waiting until we got a good cold snap, hoping to catch them when the sap wasn't running. But I'm not sure a cold snap is a reasonable hope at this point. The sap may never have really stopped. A couple of the trees have the beginnings of blossoms on the branches already, tiny round buds. I felt I'd better go ahead since the timing will only get worse.

Pruning trees isn't hard really, if you have reasonable strength and mobility. It's more of a mental exercise. I never really understood the point of bonsai until I taught myself to prune fruit trees. It takes a little knowledge -- which types of branches are desirable, which aren't, what overall shape you're aiming for with each type of tree. You can have those general ideas in your mind, but when you're standing in front of an actual tree with shears in your hands, what you have is a series of dozens of individual decisions, each a little different from the one before. Every tree is different, every branch is different. Every time is a little risk. Is this a good decision? Will it ultimately help the fruit or hurt the tree? Every time you snip those shears, you're making a commitment. There's no going back.

So it's an exercise that takes concentration, and concentration takes calm. Or makes calm, I'm not sure which. You don't even know your results right away; you have to wait months, and the larger process is a work of years. It takes patience. I can see how pruning could become a kind of spiritual ritual.

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Springwatch: the frogs sang all day Saturday, and today I saw feral daffodils blooming all along the road back to the city.

Comments

[travels_in_time]

Hm. Now I wonder how pruning trees compares to raising* kids. What habits and patterns of behavior do you let grow, and which do you nip in the bud? Some choices are obvious, while for some the results won't be noticeable for years. Not a perfect analogy by any means, just something I thought of while reading your post.

*I read somewhere that "cattle are raised, children are reared", but I never heard "reared" while growing up, only "raised". Moo.

[neverspent]

I haven't raised children, but I think your analogy really works. In addition, I think both practices tend to be forgiving, to a point. Trial-and-error is part of the endeavor, and while you can never actually undo something you've done, you can try to repair it and learn for next time, and somehow they grow around the mistake.

(Raised vs reared is one of those "strict English teacher" things that doesn't have a lot of merit these days, in my opinion. Yes, reared was supposed to be for human children, raised for agricultural products, but raised is in such common usage for both things, I think it sneaks by and should be perfectly acceptable! http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/nonerrors.html)