The hard-core art of pruning
Deft pruning will make a plant more handsome but is done principally for practical reasons — to establish a strong single leader, to remove rubbing branches or to repair damage, for example.
In Japan, pruning is a near-sacred art practised by skilled gardeners who can spend as long as 15 years in a formal apprenticeship. There, the driver is artistry. One of the key objectives is to render trees as they might look in nature after a century or two, though in a somewhat shrunken form and a shorter timeline. And no conifer or maple or azalea is pruned for itself alone. They are treated as interrelated players in a carefully considered scene.
Californian Leslie Buck thought she understood this, training under a Japanese-American mentor. She belongs to a subset of professional gardeners called esthetic-pruners. But when she attended conferences, the message was clear: If you want to perfect this, you have to make a pilgrimage to Japan.
What followed was a threemonth stint with a venerable company of gardeners from Kyoto. In her mid-30s, she found herself in a form of horticultural boot camp, with an all-male crew of manic gardeners led by a boss who was as tough as a drill sergeant. Buck later discovered that Bossman was much older than he looked and had been trained as a kamikaze pilot in the Second World War.
In his 70s, he was as strong and indefatigable as men in his crew who were half his age.
They worked at a breakneck pace for 10 hours a day, six days a week. They pruned on precarious bamboo poles lashed between high branches, and they worked through thunderstorms, freezing downpours and even an earthquake. They observed the strict boundaries of etiquette in a hierarchical system Buck was now a part of. She learned to check her feelings and keep her mouth shut, aided somewhat by her limited knowledge of Japanese. The frustrations and sense of cultural isolation built.
The experience left Buck physically drained and an emotional wreck. She could not open a journal she had kept there until three years had lapsed. “I almost had a nervous breakdown.”
Over a period of 15 years, she worked and reworked her diaries into a book, newly published and titled Cutting Back: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto.
As is generally the case with boot camp, though, she came through it stronger and with a sense of selfrespect that endures more than two decades years later.
Bossman would shout and ridicule, but Buck came to see that he was pushing her to become both tough and skilled. And when she returned to the U.S., she realized she had polished her craft — all informed by those underlying sensibilities.
“I still think, how is everything working together, and am I getting drama into this garden?” said Buck, now 51.
When she returns to a favourite Japanese maple during its early years, she sees herself as the tutor, the plant her pupil. She is guiding its growth, not controlling it.
In Japan, she learned that pruning maples had to do with considering not the structure of the branches but the space between them.
Pine trees were another frequent player in the gardens, both the prized red pine and the highly sculptural black pines. Pruners would shape them in the spring and fall in unthinkable ways. In the book, Buck recounts arriving at one garden where pruners have paid twice yearly visits to the pines for 350 years.
Her writings, inevitably, are a reflection on the contrasts between the roles of the gardener in two very different cultures. In the U.S., the person who designs a garden is put on a pedestal above the people building it, never mind the invisible souls who maintain it.
In Japan, they are all of the same high standing. The clients, who paid well for their teams of expert pruners, would observe them at work as a form of timeless cultural spectacle.