Resurrection

There are few things I like better than practicing subtractive sculpture on the plant kingdom.  So when the snow finally melted last week I picked up my pruning weapons--secateurs, curved folding saw, and long-handled clippers--and set out to whip my fruit trees into shape.

Normally I do this in March, but this has been a long and cruel winter.  The four apple trees and the espaliered apricot had clearly had enough, however, and decided to ignore the frigid temperatures and pay attention to the sunlight, which has been glorious, and get on with things.  The sap was running and they were full of buds, especially the apricot which is crucified against the south wall of the house.

I was amazed at how much the apple trees had grown.  If it weren't for my determination to keep them short enough to be tended by me without a ladder, they'd be fifteen feet high by now.  I hope that their new owners will appreciate picking those 13 oz. mega-apples without even having to stand on tiptoe.

Like the fruit trees, the bluebirds had had enough, and decided to forgo the courtship rituals and proceed with their nest building.  This is their third year in the little nest box by the back porch.  So far this season the male has not attacked our windows.  I'm hoping that he is finally mature enough to know which battles are worth fighting, and which are not.  I'm also hoping that a pair of bluebirds nesting right by the window will prove a selling point for our house.

All winter long I worried about the little potted fig tree that I'd bought on a hot day last summer.  The label said it could withstand temperatures down to -10F, but I was sweating through a Vermont summer that left no doubt in anybody's mind about the realities of climate change, so I didn't worry too much about below-zero nights.

By October the little tree had dropped all its leaves, although a few mummified figs, born too late to ripen, still clung to its branches.  I wrapped the tree in burlap as best I could, set it in a sheltered corner, and retreated indoors.  The snows came and came, and the temperature dropped so low that one of the hens' combs froze and fell off.  The snow weighed down the burlap and made big gaping holes in it.  I didn't think the little tree had a prayer of surviving the worst winter in decades.

After I was done pruning the other day, I unwrapped the fig and peered at it closely.  Its long skinny trunk was still upright, with a few stick-like branches projecting from it.  But it was uniformly gray and dry and dead-looking, with no sign of buds anywhere.  What had I been thinking, trying to grow figs in Vermont?


Figuring that I didn't have much to lose, I took my pruning shears and with the blade made a tiny scratch near the bottom of the trunk--and lo, there was green beneath the gray!  Bright, moist, live, figgy green!  Against all odds, the little tree had made it.

Best of all, unlike my old friends the apple trees and the espaliered apricot and the bluebirds, all of whom I will have to leave behind when we move away in June, I will bundle the brave little fig tree in the car along with Wolfie and Bisou, and take it with me to our new home.

Shape

When I ordered my lemon tree online, this is what I had in mind...

except for the elegant planter, of course, and the palace of Versailles in the background.  I didn't expect it to have that perfect shape, either, since mine would be in its comparative infancy.  But I did assume that it would have been pruned in such a way as to have some hope of growing into a decent shape.  Sort of the way you take a puppy to puppy classes so it will have the best chances of growing up to be a good dog.

When my tree arrived it had indeed been pruned--you could see the stubs where former branches had attached to the trunk--but it looked like it had been pruned by a tribe of drunken monkeys.  Branches were growing at crazy angles, pressing against each other and looking scraggly.  Getting this tree was a bit like adopting a dog from the pound--neither one arrives looking its best.

But, as with a new dog, at first my attention on the tree was focused on survival issues--giving it just the right amount of water, putting it in a spot it liked.  This must have worked, because the next thing I knew the tree was covered in flower buds, dozens of them on every branch.  Many of those buds fell off, but many clung to the branches and started opening, filling the kitchen with their scent.

Much as I loved the blooms, however, every time I went near the tree all I could see were those clumsy branches growing at ugly angles.  I badly wanted to do some pruning, but I held back because, 1.  you're only supposed to prune while a tree is dormant, and mine was exuberantly awake;  and, 2.  by chopping off the offensive branches I would be cutting my potential lemon crop in half.

 I didn't want to harm the tree, and I badly wanted every last lemon it could produce, so for a couple of weeks I controlled myself and tried to focus on the flowers, which I was hand-pollinating with an old watercolor brush, and their smell. But I wasn't satisfied. To me, the flowers were decorative and thus contingent, but the shape of the tree was essential.  And the shape was all wrong.

Then one morning I was impersonating a bee, dabbing pollen onto pistils, when suddenly, out of nowhere, I had pruning shears in my hand and was slicing off branches right and left.  Decimating my potential lemon crop.  Possibly harming the tree.

I threw the branches (all those flower buds, such a pity!) out on the snow and took a good look at my newly svelte tree.  It was no longer covered in blossoms, but now it had shape, design, intention.   It no longer looked like a refugee from the pound, but like a tree that was loved.

March is almost here, and the little apple trees on my patio are looking scraggly, full of suckers that cry out for the secateurs.  By the time I'm done with them they will be nicely pollarded, the main branches coming off the trunk at wide angles, the interior of the tree trimmed free of clutter so the sun can reach the fruit.  They will have the well-tended, cared-for look of a freshly bathed dog and whoever sees them will think, "these are trees that somebody loves."

Some Catholic Reflections On An Early Spring

As many of you know, I am a former Catholic--or rather a lapsed Catholic,  since few people ever succeed in ridding themselves completely of Holy Mother Church's hold on their psyches.  I ceased practicing in my twenties, since I couldn't go along with the Church's position on birth control and had been taught that a cafeteria-style Catholicism was worse than no Catholicism at all.  But I can still chant the Credo in latin, and will do so at the drop of a hat.

The imprint goes much deeper than Gregorian chant and the smell of beeswax candles, however.  It is my suppressed Catholicism, for instance, that is responsible for my tendency to imbue everyday happenings with a religious significance.  Take, for instance, this early spring, which has caused maple sugaring to begin a full three weeks ahead of schedule. 

I know many people who glory in this sort of weather, who are grateful to be able to get outdoors and start raking the hay mulch off the flower beds--a task that in normal years they couldn't even begin to think about until April.  I, on the other hand, view this warmth with deep suspicion.  For one thing, we don't deserve it.  We don't deserve it because we haven't earned it by three good months of snow-shoveling, fire-stoking, and long-underwear-wearing.  There have been no blizzards, no cabin fever, and thus none of that bursting out of doors on the first day the thermometer hits 32F to fling spinach seeds on the still snow-covered garden.  The prizes that aren't sacrificed and waited for are hardly worth the winning.  It is by our sufferings in this vale of tears that we earn eternal life, no?

Furthermore, I think this early spring is the first stage of something we have earned:  a severe punishment, in the form of global warming, for our sins against the earth.  Hildegard of Bingen knew what she was talking about, back in the 12th century, when she said:  

Now in the people that were meant to be green there is no more life of any kind. There is only shriveled barrenness. The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil, selfish goings-on. Thunderstorms menace. The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. The earth should not be injured! The earth must not be destroyed!

To distract myself from these dire thoughts, yesterday I pruned my two little apple trees.  I was shocked, when I took off the first "sucker," to see how much green there was under the bark.  The sap had certainly been running, and I hoped I was not too late with my shears.  But I finished the job anyway, sculpting the trees by cutting away the upright-growing branches and preserving the ones that came off the trunk at a wide angle, and snipping off the skinny little twigs that would get in the way of a thrown cat (if an apple tree has been properly pruned, you should be able to throw a cat through its branches).

And here again I found myself having Catholic thoughts--all this cutting and purifying and inflicting pain (I hope not much) in the hopes of a glorious future harvest reminded me of going to confession, where in exchange for the pain of telling your sins to a stranger you are left feeling cleansed and full of hope.

Speaking of which, as soon as it stops raining, I will plant my spinach, which mundane act will not fail to remind me that by doing my little bit to minimize the "shriveled barrenness" of the earth I will perhaps save my life, and possibly even my soul.

Pruning Apple Trees

Today I did one of my favorite garden jobs--favorite perhaps because it is the first of the season:  I pruned my apple trees.  There is still a foot and a half of snow on the ground, but in my little subtropical, south-facing patio, it felt balmy.  It seems early for fruit-tree pruning, but I had seen a man stringing sap lines in the "sugar bush" by the side of the road yesterday, so I figured it would be all right for me to work on the trees.

My European background comes to the fore when I deal with fruit trees:  I prune the heck out of them.  I keep the apple trees no taller than about seven feet, because I want to be able to reach every part of them without a ladder.  They seem to like the treatment, and reward me with huge (relative to their size) harvests.

The pruning consists mostly of getting rid of "suckers," those long, upright-growing branches bearing only leaf buds, and so called because they suck nutrients away from the fruit-bearing branches.  When my daughters were little they used to pick up the longest, straightest suckers to use as foils, and they would have sword fights.  I would gather the rest of the cuttings and throw them over the fence for the goats.  This being the first fresh food they'd seen in months, the goats would dive into the pile of suckers, and munch happily in the sun for hours.

Today, in the absence of both children and goats,  Wolfie and Bisou picked up a few suckers and carried them around for a while.  I left the rest of them on the ground for the rabbit.  We're expecting another foot of snow tomorrow, and I figured he might get hungry.

Pruning Away

There is a lilac bush on either side of our front door. Although I am anything but a symmetry addict, I realize that it would be good if the two bushes were, if not identical, at least similar in size and shape. But they aren't. The one on the left is lanky and woody; the one on the right is bushy and full. The lanky one makes dark-red blooms; the bushy one makes regular lilac-colored flowers.

For a couple of years now I've been trying to coax the bush on the left to be more bushy, while restraining the exuberance of the bush on the right. As a result of my efforts, they are marginally more similar than they used to be. But they are nowhere near the symmetry of a pair of beefeaters flanking the doors of Buckingham Palace.

My goal today was to shorten both bushes, and to clip the one on the right so it doesn't obscure the (never used: this is Vermont, after all) front door. That was a bit like trying to shorten the legs of your dining room table--you take off a bit here, then a bit more there, then some more...and before you know it, you have a coffee table with a wobble.

I had enough sense to give up after a while, and proceeded to the two big lilacs around the side and back of the house. This was not a good lilac year. A late hard frost nipped the buds even in our south-facing quasi-tropical micro-climate. Nevertheless, today all the lilacs got their annual hair cut (I aim for a feathered, informal do).

Before I could stop myself, I was at the little apple trees again. I have a vision in my head of a 15th century German woodcut of the Virgin sitting in an enclosed garden under a perfectly shaped, almost spherical apple tree. And that is what I want mine to look like. I figured that, even though the official pruning season is over, it couldn't hurt to snip off a bit here and there, so I did. The trees didn't seem to mind.

Is it a Catholic thing, this obsession with taking away what doesn't belong and leaving only what is right and proper? Is it a control issue? Is it a genetically-transmitted European fondness for pollarding? Is it just another, faster version of subtractive sculpture?

It may be one or all of these things. But there is no doubt what my favorite garden tool is: the secateurs.