Pruning

A week ago, I took a pruning class at a local community demonstration garden. This educational class not only gave me more confidence in pruning, but it also inspired me to get back into gardening after my winter days of waiting. Because of this class, I now have a beautifully trimmed Camellia tree in my backyard and a new insight on how pruning can metaphorically influence me as a landscape designer.

Although the dictionary defines the act of pruning as cutting or lopping ‘superfluous or undesired twigs, branches, or roots from’ a plant, I would advise that there is much more to pruning than just this. As my instructor taught me, pruning is not only the act of trimming unnecessary branches and twigs, but of aesthetically and spiritually ‘shaping’ the plant as well. Although I can go on for days about how all these pruning concepts can be transferable to the landscape, I will try to limit this rant to the basics.

When pruning, a ‘good start’ is to look at the ‘3D’s’ of the tree or shrub you are to trim. These branches include the 1) dead, the 2) damaged and 3) dysfunctional. Because the first two characteristics are pretty self explanatory, I’ll divulge on the latter. What makes a branch dysfunctional is that it is not promoting to the function of the plant. If a branch is crossing over another, it may be deemed dysfunctional because it is taking light, water and space for growth from the other branch. Hence, that branch should be pruned. This sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. When two or more branches are crossing, the pruner has to decide which branch is better fit to serve the function of the plant. Wow. I now understand why I was intimidated for so many years when the topic of pruning came up in the garden. How do you know which branch will serve the plant best? What if you pick the wrong branch? What if you make a mistake? Well, as I quickly learned while pruning my Camellia, mistakes happen and inevitably you will choose the wrong branch to cut. I will not go into how devastated I was when I cut the wrong branch on my Camellia, but I will tell you this: I learned that the flaw I created not only extenuated the adaptability of the shrub, but my own flexibility as well. The Camellia quickly showed me that the hole I created with my trigger happy pruners could be filled by another branch and all I had to do was encourage that branch to fill it.

An 'after' photo of my Camellia (I forgot to take a 'before', but try to imagine a big ball of a bush.)

I hope I haven’t lost you in all this talk of cutting, crossing and Camellias, because I would now like to explain how the concepts of the ‘3Ds’ are transferable to the landscape. Unlike an artist approaching a blank canvas, the landscape architect; designer; gardener never gets to start anew. No matter how empty or unused a landscape may seem, it is part of an evolving, living world that is anything but blank. With this in mind, the architect or designer must look at the landscape and see what may be 1) dead, 2) damaged and 3) dysfunctional.

As with pruning, finding the dead and damaged material of the land is not a difficult task. But how does one decide what is dysfunctional? If you have ‘weeds’, are they serving a purpose, a function in the landscape? Are they taking light, water and space from another ‘branch’ or plant in your garden? If your answer is yes, then maybe the weeds need to go. This is a simple example, like an easy to see branch that needs to be pruned, but like the shrub, not all dysfunctional ‘branches’ in the landscape are so easy to fix.

In my yard, there are many dysfunctional characteristics, but one, not so simple to solve is the overabundance of shrubs and trees crowding the yard. Because there are so many woody plants, the very large yard, seems to be dwarfed by their numbers. So, what am I to do? Should I immediately plan to remove plants that are not promoting to the function of the yard? And how do I deem which plants those are? This is where I think I will take the advice of my pruning instructor and ‘start small’. Instead of going in and looping down random trees, I think I will start by pruning each tree and shrub. By doing this, maybe I can start to see if each plant serves a function in the yard.

Like I learned while pruning my Camellia, I know that as I move forward as a gardener and landscape designer, I will inevitably make mistakes. Although the land is just as adaptable as my pruned shrub, I must remember to look and see what the landscape has to offer before deeming too much unnecessary. Whether this is in my own backyard or a large public park, I must also try to be just as flexible as the land I encounter.

Winter

The book I just finished is titled: Winter. Because this book was written with such eloquence and simplicity, the author, Rick Bass, is now one of my favorites. Like many of my favorite authors, he is a naturalist. He writes with such lucid reverence for the ‘natural’ world, that at times I felt myself sigh as I read his prose. This nonfictional account of Rick Bass’ first winter in a remote valley of Montana, not only gave me an escape from the warm, congested city life of San Francisco, but it also brought about reflection on what winter meant to me.

Raised as a cold season gardener, winter has meant one thing to me: waiting. Because I come from a place where frost covers the land three to six months out of the year, winter is spent indoors, by the heater, anticipating the green season to come.

Although I have lived in California for many years, first San Diego and now the Bay area, I guess I still have yet to acclimate to the year-round garden. Even though the weather is warm and the ground is anything but frozen, I still find myself snuggled tightly under a blanket during winter, waiting for the symbolic red-breasted robin to magically appear to let me know that spring has sprung. I find myself waiting, when no waiting needs to be done.

This winter has not been much different from the years past. In fact, if I think about it, I have been waiting much longer than just this winter. Yes, I had a small vegetable garden last summer, but the waiting I am speaking of is not in reference to me gardening. I have been waiting in other aspects of my life.

Almost two years ago, I found myself waiting for the new life which began inside my womb to enter this world. My daughter was born, and I still found myself waiting for her grow beyond her baby ways. Because I always envisioned having a toddler, not a vulnerable infant, I patiently waited for her to roll-over, sit, stand and finally walk. Now that my toddler is here, I look back and wonder if I was waiting, when no waiting needed to be done. What I’m getting at is that maybe my waiting was preventing me from being in the present and enjoying every minute with my daughter. Although I didn’t miss any of her milestone moments, I can imagine appreciating them more if I wasn’t so focused on what she would do next.

This realization about my relationship with my daughter saddens me slightly, yet I must learn from it. I must remember to walk in the present with my daughter with no future expectations. We both deserve nothing less.

The other aspect of my life I have been waiting on is for the perfect job to come knocking on my door. As I write these very words, I wait for the phone call or email from a perspective employer, instead of updating my portfolio. My portfolio is long over due for this update, yet I wait, when no waiting needs to be done.

As the sun shines on my back this warm winter day, I have decided that my winter days of waiting have passed. I will do as Thoreau wrote and, “live each season as it passes.” I will cherish each day with my daughter, get to the task of updating my portfolio and build the garden I have been dreaming of throughout these winter days. Rick Bass explains that winter is no time to be timid, and so I move forward with his advice:

Love the winter. Don’t betray it. Be loyal.

When the spring gets here, love it too – and then the summer.

But be loyal to the winter, all the way through – all the way, and with sincerity – or you’ll find yourself high and dry, longing for a spring that’s a long way off, and winter will have abandoned you, and in her place you’ll have cabin fever, the worst.

Repeat

As I got up to attend to my 15 month old teething daughter for the third time that night, a common thought came to my mind: not again. She again needed my attention, I was again moved to her bedside and I was again asked to stay awake until she fell back to sleep. As I lay awake with her nursing, I reflected on the past months and the one thought that seemed to pulsate behind my sleepy eyes was the word again.

I'm not sure why it is I seem to get fixated on words, but for some strange reason, they resonate with me for awhile before they get lost in my thought cloud of day to day life. This night, my word started as again and it soon subconsciously transformed into the prefix re. I began to pass time by thinking of as many words that started with re. They floated by my closed eyes: renew, resolve, remove, replace, recycle, reply, and repeat. The word game progressed as I removed the prefix and imagined each word followed by the word again: new-again, solve-again, place-again, cycle-again, ply-again, and peat-again. My eyes flew open wide, peat - peat, like the soil amendment? Does this word have another meaning which I never chose to see? If this word in fact means what I think it means, then the word repeat means to reapply fertilizer or amend the soil again, I thought to myself. Suddenly, this word which only seconds ago gave off a dull negative vibe, now, seemed to strike a new chord with positive energy.

I will have to note now that as a landscape designer and avid gardener, I love words that are used in everyday language which originated to describe working the land. Some of these words include: reap, harvest, sow, amend, cultivate and, of course, plant. This might explain why this new revelation about the word repeat was so exciting to me.

This new definition of repeat also awakened me because, lately, my life has seemed to be stuck on repeat. I have repeatedly attended to my daughter, I have repeatedly been looking for a job, and I have repeatedly played out the same day over and over again. The monotony of it all seemed slightly insignificant until repeat took on this new meaning. Because repeat now meant to attend to, my day to day life had a new meaning. I was no longer repeating without reason. Like the application of peat to the soil, I was encouraging growth and cultivating success with each repetition!

Before this revelation, I, of course, knew that each time I comforted my daughter, our bond with each other is strengthened and every time I send out a job application, my chances for employment increases, but this confirmation was exactly what I needed at the moment. I no longer felt lost in a uniform existence, but tied back to where I belonged – the Earth. The earth, the soil, the peat – it is a reminder that all my actions are a part of something larger than myself and that each time I re-peat, I am adding nutrients to that ground. The ground to which I speak of is not only mine, but that of my daughter’s, my loved ones and even those whom I have never met. I guess you can say that the word repeat has reminded me that we are all connected, not only on this earth, but with it.

Now, as I leave to attend to my daughter…again, I am reminded of a childhood joke: Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete falls off, who is left?