Christchurch
Nothing like a trip overseas to blow preconceptions away – in this case, about Japan. It is far from the Switzerland of Asia of my mind’s eye.
What Mary Lovell-Smith learnt in Japan about caring for trees
All is not tidy, modern and organised. Instead, much is gloriously chaotic and ramshackle. Their highrise apartment balconies are not minimalist forests – most tend to host clothes-drying racks, surplus household goods and air-conditioning units. Down narrow urban paths, we catch the odd glimpse of well-tended and beautiful private gardens, yet most domestic gardens we see are not serene compositions in rocks, gravel and water but a mass of plants squeezed into whatever space can be found around the tiny houses crammed into the maze of alleyways and streets which rival Venice in complexity.
In these narrow streets draped with power lines, telegraph lines and cables, footpaths are rare. Vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians share a space into which the citizens’ horticultural endeavours spill. Pressed against the houses are plants – from trees to annuals – in pots, troughs, buckets and even the ground.
Shimokitazawa, a neighbourhood in Tokyo, boasts the thinnest macrocarpa hedge imaginable perched on a sliver of land between the walls of a house and a steep drop. In front of a little battered dwelling in a narrow inner city Kyoto street is a tired, tiered stand, its shelves jammed with elegant bonsai in ancient pottery basins, plastic pots and rusting tin cans.
The grounds around the temples and castles are breathtaking on a grand scale of simplicity, often just perfectly spaced and well-formed trees growing out of extremely short grass or moss.
It is the trees that we most love – as perhaps do the Japanese themselves,
if the care lavished upon them is anything to go by. Clipped and cut, propped and protected, almost every tree we see is beautifully formed.
Commonplace is cloud pruning.
This Japanese technique has shrubs and trees trained to resemble clouds, usually at the end of bare branches, sometimes bunched together like balloons or billowing in hedges like a storm gathering in the sky.
In downtown Kyoto, the 6m high trees lining both sides of the road have just been pruned so the cut marks are still visible. Arborists here appear to deliberate on every cut, big or small. While aesthetics seem a priority, the respect given to each tree verges on reverence.
Where we in New Zealand may lop, in Japan they prop.
A 300-year-old pine tree in Hamarikyu Gardens in the heart of Tokyo looks like a grove of trees but is in fact just one – the dozens of sturdy poles propping up its mighty spreading branches are concealed by foliage.
Such first aid seems routine. From simple crutches to elaborate constructions, the effort to save the branches seems almost to result in more supports than branches.
Parasol-shaped yukitsuri are used to shield trees from snow.
Built in November and dismantled in March, a central pole is erected beside the trunk from which ropes are suspended and attached to branches, preventing them from sagging and breaking under the weight of snow. Hundreds of ropes may be used on a single tree, so it’s no job for an amateur. That said, the many we subsequently see in domestic gardens are no less charming despite how relatively rudimentary they appear.
In the mountain towns of Nagano and Yamanouchi, it takes me a while to work out – and a snowfall to confirm – what the tracks of parallel bamboo stakes running along the top of a hedge are. It looks like a piped water feature but the scaffolding is another defence against snow.
Strange upright bundles of dead-looking foliage are also snow-proofing devices.
Working on the principle of strength in unity, the branches are bound tightly together with straw rope. Sometimes they are wrapped in straw matting and – regrettably – sometimes in coloured plastic netting. Often the bundles are topped in pretty pointed straw caps as the Japanese once again combine aesthetics with practicality.
The curious cummerbunds many pine trees are wearing are also seasonal attire.
The enemy this time are pests. The straw matting is wrapped around the trunks in early winter to protect them against pine moths, whose caterpillars use them as a warm place in which to hibernate. Just before the moths emerge in early spring, the matting is removed and burnt, pests and all.
After three weeks in Japan, we arrived back to a Christchurch just recovering from November’s soaring temperature. Looking at my sunburned puka, a few Nipponese lessons on tending trees could well be put into practice.