For me, remembering started with a job. Just another job. Thanks to the wonderful landscape designers at Olin Studio, we got the opportunity to train ninety-two new trees in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Fifty-two of them were lindens. We were to create aerial hedges—that is, tall hedges held up above the ground on the trunks of trees—in two sets of two rows. When we were done, they would look much like a boxwood or a yew hedge, but about forty feet tall. My company had done this work before, and we loved it.
The other forty trees were to be pollards of London plane trees. They were planted in four small, regularly spaced rectilinear groves that the designers called bosques. The idea was to make a place with a beautiful pattern of branching in winter and a small-scale place to sit in the shade come summer. Ornamental pollarding was meant to carry into the city the beauty that was produced in the country almost as a by-product of producing wood for people’s use. We had done some experimental pollarding in our work, but this style of pruning was so out of fashion that we had not done very much of it.
Allison Harvey, one of the designers, and I stood in front of a grove of ten young London plane trees, one of the four new bosques that had recently been planted in front of the museum. It was the end of March. A late cold storm had lined each branch with a white highlighter of wet snow. The trees surely did not look normal. Indeed, they looked more like a child’s first drawing of a tree. Each trunk was prominent, but each branch was either a single fat line or a rough V in shape. The ends were stubbed: each had been cut off short, and most of the slender branchlets at the tips had been removed. On some, we’d left a single stub about the size of a cigar or cigarette butt. On others, where two little branchlets had emerged, we’d cut them back to a double stub that looked like the two biggest knuckles on your fist. Etched in snow, each tree as a whole looked more like a bottle brush of a size suitable to clean tanker trucks. I half expected the sun to come up like an orange slice of pizza in a corner of the page, with a smiling face and a halo of spikes, and my stick-figure mother to put her five stiff fingers across my flat-line back.
I smiled. Allison smiled back. In my heart, I was thinking, “I have killed them all. The museum has spent millions of dollars on this place, and I have killed them all.” Everything I had ever learned about trees told me that that was not true. For 400 million years, woody plants have learned to deal with the inevitable damage and destruction of fungi, beetles, storms, plant eaters, and pruners, by sprouting back when they were wounded. Still, these trees were only recently transplanted and so did not have a normal root system. They had lived happily in southern New Jersey until we ripped them up and brought them to Manhattan. I was convinced that they would be the exception that proved the rule.
I recited to myself the mantra that I tell my students every winter as my pruning class begins: “When a tree is wounded, there are only three things it can do: 1. It can adapt remaining branches to replace what was lost; 2. It can release dormant or suppressed buds to create new branches to replace what was lost; or 3. It can create brand-new buds and twigs out of the cambium layer inside the stem.” This was meant to comfort and encourage me, but I suddenly realized that I had left out an additional possibility: “4. It can die.”
I was not new to these forty trees. For two years, we had been training them in the nursery. First, we had cut off the tops, so they would remain at the height we’d chosen. Then, we had begun to select from the thirty or forty lateral branches on each tree, removing a few at a time. We wanted each to have eight to twelve branches when it was finally trained. We had created an elaborate trellis system, using slender wire and bamboo poles lashed to the trunks to tie down the top branches so they would grow more outward than upward. Where a branch had many smaller branches, we had removed most of those, or left only a couple.
We knew what we were aiming at: urban pollards. These highly trained trees are still common in France and in Southern Europe. Instead of a tall-growing tree with arrays of branches that themselves ramify into smaller and smaller branchlets and then twigs, these would have a low, fixed height and instead of sprouting all along each lateral branch, they would sprout only (and prolifically) from the stubbed ends. In winter, the selected branches and their starbursts of sprouts cast a wonderful shadow on the ground, like a living rose window. In summer, they make a lovely place to sit and picnic or to listen to a band concert, well protected from the sun, but not smothered in the deep shade of forest giants. That was the program.
But how to achieve this end in the heart of Manhattan? I thought I knew just where to go to learn. As a boy on the Peninsula, about fifteen miles south of San Francisco, I had been obsessed with the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park. At the time, as you entered the building, you stood immediately before half a city block of swampland, sunken into the ground and surrounded with a brass railing, but otherwise uncaged. It was full of alligators, some as big as drag racers, some as small as bagpipes, piled one atop the other in irregular heaps. We boys waited for one to move, or even better, to slide into the water and promenade. Around the open tank, in glass terrariums on the wall was an array of highly colored snakes and lizards from around the world. To me, it was paradise.
Every weekend, my brother and I wheedled our parents to take us there. When we succeeded, there was almost always a bargain: if we take you to the gators, you have to go with us to the De Young Museum. The latter was full of horrible Chinese ceramics. We had no choice but to agree if we wanted our reptile fix. But we had to do something to escape the awful shiny pots.
Pollards were the answer. The Music Concourse separates the two museums. It was built as a sunken garden—lowered out of the afternoon wind and paved with crushed stone and gravel—to make room for as many as twenty thousand people to listen to the concerts that emanated from the Spreckels Temple of Music, a Venus-on-the-half-shell-style Beaux Arts bandshell at one end. Built in 1900, the concourse has had pollarded trees from the very beginning. Now, there are almost three hundred of them, about two thirds of them mature, gridded through the vast space. Among the older trees, the majority are wych elms, with London planes a close second, plus all kinds of other experiments, even a field maple and a black walnut. The older trees are no taller today than they were sixty years ago, when I was five years old, although they are much larger in girth.
Back then, replete from our watching of alligators and caimans, we had had to walk the prisoner’s mile across the concourse toward the dreaded De Young. Inevitably, we had started out under the first pollards: “Hey, you guys, we’ll just play here! Okay?” Parental disapproval. “Look, we won’t leave the trees. It’ll be fine.” When they had reflected upon how whining kids would spoil their museum visit and how the space was a bowl naturally bounded by the trees and the steep banks at the edge, they usually at last relented. So I had got to know the trees quite well. You couldn’t climb them, because the first branch was eight feet in the air, a stratospheric height to a kid. And you couldn’t play hide-and-seek, because the lower trunks were completely without branches, unless you learned to stand very straight and still.
I had never before seen trees like them. I asked my dad, “Are they real?” He averred that they were, but he had little more to say about them. He was a doctor and so, I thought, knew everything. His silence on these creatures had seemed deafening.
But the people who still cared for these very trees . . . they would know. Five decades after I had first met the concourse pollards, I thought I would at last find out all about them, particularly about how to make and to care for them.
Through the nearby Strybing Arboretum, I found out that the city Parks department was in charge of the trees. They put me in touch with Scott McCormick, who agreed to show me his work on the concourse. There were also many pollarded trees on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, he told me. Perhaps the gardeners there would be able to help? I thanked him for the thought and contacted the men in charge at Berkeley, Phil Cody and Jim Horner. Finally, I remembered an estate garden called Filoli, about 20 miles south of the city on the Peninsula near Woodside. My mother had helped to open it to the public during the 1970s. I knew that it had London plane pollards. I arranged to meet its horticulturist, Alex Fernandez, there.
My relief at finding advisers was not long-lived. McCormick was a fine young man. “This was the job everybody hated,” he told me. “It takes so long, and you have to be careful where you cut.” He loved it and willingly took it on. “It is very very interesting to me,” he went on, “and I have a few guys now who agree. Trouble is we don’t know what we are doing.”
Many of the trees first planted in Golden Gate Park a hundred years ago were gone, and in more difficult places, some had been replaced three or four times. The pruners were not sure whether to cut back new trees a lot or a little, whether to leave the stumps of one or two sprouts when they pruned back the younger pollard heads or not. When a head got so heavy that it threatened to break the branch, they didn’t know whether if they removed it the branch would form a new one. They were not sure whether to use more planes, more elms, or even something completely different. “We try everything,” he said, “and we try to keep a record of what works.” There was no old hand to advise them.
Never mind. At UC Berkeley, they would be able to help. I got to the campus two hours before my meeting with Cody and Horner, so I could have a look around. The place was awash in pollarded London planes. Hallelujah! Up hill and down, through the whole campus, if it was not a grove of eucalyptus, it was a line or a bosque of pollards. One group of thirty stood in a rectangle, with tops that had been trained flat. Others were finished trees with large pollard heads and branches upraised in acclamation. Still more were brand-new trees, their first stubby branch cuts just executed. I thought there was something wrong with these last, but I could not quite tell what. It looked as though someone had tried to imitate the shape of the mature pollards exactly in the form of the young ones, on the theory that the latter would grow up simply by adding girth and length, as though they were very large balloon animals and Great Nature’s were the lungs that would inflate them.
The prize of the whole campus was four rows of plane pollards that stretched north in parallel rows from the campus monument, the obeliskine campanile. The trees had been transplanted from the grounds of the Panama Pacific International Exhibition after that fair closed in late 1915. Since the trees were already established when planted at the fair, they were well over a century old when I saw them. This in itself surprised me, because I did not think that trees so deeply pruned would live so long. Since these had survived for so many years, I reasoned, if I could learn how they were started, I would know how to proceed.
Because they had been pollarded, the rows did not tower. As I walked among them on a sunny winter day, waiting to meet Horner and Cody, I had the impression of walking underwater. The crown branches arched up and out like a many-headed candelabra. The end of each was dark and heavy, like a flattened burl, knotty, knobbly, scaly, rough. Each of them looked as though it should be at the bottom of the tree, not at the top, unless of course they were floating underwater, like the inflated bulbs of bull kelp that bob just beneath the surface of Monterey Bay.
Atop each of these pimply scabs waved the most unexpected things imaginable: long thin twigs of rising wood—each two or three feet long—supple, blond, delicate. If you have ever seen clams or mussels feeding—with delicate pink nets of translucent tissue that float like a skirt around the half-opened shell—you have seen the contrast: out of something gross and solid rose something bright, almost filamentous.
Each of the fifty-six trees had between twelve and twenty branches, each branch topped with a fistful of the same long slender sprouts. Each tree was only about twenty-five feet tall, a third the size that you would expect in a centenarian London plane tree. Each year (or sometimes every other year) the new sprouts were pruned back to the burls. During the growing season, they created a regular rounded canopy of leaves. In the winter they cast their concentric shadows on the ground.
In the year 1915, the Panama Pacific Exhibition had announced not only San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake, but also its arrival as a city on the world stage. Immodestly, its makers had dubbed the event “the greatest, most beautiful and most important in history.” The neighborhood later called the Marina was its setting. A lot of the land was fill dirt, which in many subsequent earthquakes has liquefied, causing foundations to crack and houses to tilt. The phantasmagoric structures of the fair—the Tower of Jewels, the Fountain of Energy, the Court of Abundance—went up in 1915, and with a few exceptions were removed at the conclusion of the fair. (Most were made of plaster mixed with burlap, not a lasting material.) The fair featured the first steam locomotive on the Southern Pacific line, searchlights to illuminate the towers, a submarine, and a transcontinental telephone call that let New Yorkers listen to the crashing Pacific surf. Among all these modern miracles had stood these very fifty-six pollarded planes, modest memorials to a time when people still spoke the language of trees.
Here came Horner and Cody. I was excited to ask them how they did it all. “I don’t know,” said one. “None of us do. The last guy who had an idea retired some time ago, and no one thought to ask him while he was still alive.” So they tried stuff. Sometimes they cut back all the sprouts every year in January or February. A few of the branches did not respond well. Instead they tried cutting back the sprouts every second year. But that made larger wounds that take longer to close, and sometimes whole heads went into decline. As for new pollards, they said they were just trying things out. Many of the young pollards looked like a push-me-pull-you; their branching rhythm was jerky, more zigzag than balletic. It appeared that Berkeley too had lost both the art and the science of making these trees.
Alex Fernandez at Filoli was my last chance. I drove down the Peninsula an hour to a valley just south of the Crystal Springs Reservoir to meet him.
The garden had once been the seat of a robber baron who had been among those who bought the land that San Francisco’s water supply reservoir would occupy. He had then sold the property to the city. He had kept the southernmost portion of the land, just past the water, to be his estate, Filoli. Later, the place had belonged to the Matson Line heiress, and finally opened as a public garden.
The entry gate was flanked by a dozen fine pollards. Inside, I could see that Fernandez had been hard at work renovating an overgrown garden. A double line of huge Irish yews—so prominent that pilots used them as landmarks when on final approach to SFO—had more than doubled in size since they had first been planted, in the 1920s. Recently, the gardeners had had to tie them together with wire to keep them from splaying out. “Whenever there was a storm, the wires would snap,” Fernandez said. “The yews would fly apart like an old lady’s girdle.” He took them back from twenty-two feet high to only twelve, and from eight feet wide to only three. “At first, it looked like hell,” he recalled. “But the next year, it was fine.” He’d also taken down an aerial beech hedge by four or five feet, renovated a long holly hedge, restored a famous double allée of espaliered fruit trees, and rounded over everything from magnolias to hawthorns. Here was a man who liked to prune. Surely, he could help me.
We walked up to the head of the yew allée. There stood half a dozen young pollards. They were scarecrows. Each stark trunk had six or seven stiff awkward broomstick branches with a knot of long sprouts at the end. Fernandez assured me that his predecessor had made these trees. “I think he let the branches grow out too long before he cut them,” he commented. “They are very stiff.”
“What should he have done?” I asked.
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he answered.
Nobody but nobody could tell me how to make this strange kind of tree. I had allies, all right, but we were partners in perplexity. We were doing our best in a vacuum of knowledge.
Given the predilections of postwar arborists, however, I guess I should not have been so surprised. Like most of my peers in tree care, I had been a student of Alex Shigo, the brilliant USDA scientist who had changed the way the whole world prunes. He had done for trees what the anatomists of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Bologna and Padua had done for the human body: instead of taking the word of authorities for what was happening inside, he dissected the body to find out what was really happening. It was shockingly different from what had been assumed. The branch collar—a part of tree anatomy not even recognized before—took center stage, and guided our pruning. A shouldered ring of tissue where the branch is attached to its parent branch or trunk, the collar had evolved over millions of years to defend the tree from damage. If we made our pruning cuts to the collar, all would go well.
But deep in the Shigo teaching lay a prejudice. He worked for the Forest Service. His job was to produce clean timber: long knotless trunks that could best be cut into dimensional boards. A Shigo-style tree looks ur-natural, almost sculptural, the tree that nature would have made were there no accidents—that is to say, were there no world. Of the three things a wounded tree can do, he favored overwhelmingly the first—letting the tree adapt its remaining branches to replace what had been lost. We were to make our cuts to collars or at least back to branchlets capable of carrying on. Under few circumstances did we want to let the tree produce sprouts, either by releasing dormant buds or by making fresh buds.
Sprouts look a lot less neat when they first arise. In fact, they are a mess, a real bad hair day. They also eventually make knots in the wood that spoil the boards—think of knotty pine versus clear pine—or at least reduce their value. And I have heard arborists repeat this phrase again and again: “Epicormic sprouts are poorly attached, and most of them will die anyway” (epicormic means dormant). Shigo himself clearly understood how important sprouts were, he understood the place of sprouts in pruning, and he honored good pollards. Many of his followers had not. And in his practice, the master never taught how to prune pollards. In some crevassed fold of my brain, I too was betting against the sprouts that I was trying to produce with my stub cuts on the London planes. What good were they anyway? I could not depend upon them, and even if they came, they were scrawny, unruly, inferior little things.
I had to look deeper in time, and elsewhere in space. Europe, everyone told me, is where they pollarded best. Off I went, at first to the library. I am good in a research room. To me, it is a distillery of the human heart, mind, and hand, where I can begin to find the truth of any matter.
What I found shocked me. At once, it encouraged and devastated me. The practice of pruning to intentionally cause sprouts was as old as the last Ice Age, and it had been practiced not only in Europe but around the world. Unfortunately, however, the modern age had decided that it was a bad thing and had mainly put a stop to it.
Shigo was only a small part of the matter, and indeed there was nothing at all wrong with his way of pruning. It made lovely, tall, upstanding, clean trees. Unintentionally, however, his focus on “natural” pruning had helped cut us off from 10,000 years of intimate exchange between people and trees. Not only are sprouts “important” in pruning, I found, they are the reason that there are any trees or shrubs at all, and they are the reason that there are any people at all. For all but the last two centuries of human history, the whole point of pruning was to produce sprouts—to stimulate the second and third of the possible wound responses that I teach in pruning class—for when those sprouts grew up they gave people firewood, charcoal, building wood, ship timber, fence posts, slender willow whips (called withies) to tie knots with, hedges, fodder, fiber, rope, and baskets. They gave us a way to stay warm, to eat, to live, a way to travel. Without them, human beings would not have made it past the Neolithic.
Also, I discovered, the way trees sprouted when cut gave people an intimation of immortality. When Isaiah envisioned the coming kingdom, he sang that no child would die or old person not live out their days; rather, each would have the life of a tree. Job too saw it plainly: in chapter 14, as he demanded that God tell him why He had broken him, he complained that death simply puts an end to men. He wished he might have been a plant: “For a tree there is hope, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again and that its tender shoots will not cease. Even though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the dust, yet at the first whiff of water, it may flourish again and put forth branches like a young plant.” Unlike a man, a tree could revive although it seemed to have died.
By means of coppice, I discovered—and as we shall see—West Africans had created a timed system of agriculture that gave lumber, grain, and vegetables and renewed the forest. By means of pollards and coppice, the Iberians had got wood, charcoal, vines, cork, ink, sweeteners, and fat pork. By means of coppice, the people of Japan had got an integral system of living that brought them rice, wood, pottery, poetry, and fire. By means of coppice and pollard, the peoples of Sweden and Norway since the Bronze Age had grown fodder for their sheep, goats, and cattle and wood for their stoves. By means of pollards, the Basques had got charcoal to make iron, wood to build and heat their houses, and they had crafted trees to make ship’s timber. By means of fire coppice, the Indians of North and South America had cleared land for growing and got back poles to make houses, fashioned traps and weirs, and stimulated the production of fruit and nuts. By means of coppice, the women of California tribes had got slender stems to make the baskets to hold food and supplies, to carry burdens, to sift, and to cook a meal. By means of pollards on the Somerset Levels in England, the Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples had got poles to build the armature for foot bridges and withies to weave fences and the frames for walls. By means of pollard and coppice, Europeans had got the small wood to burn with limestone, kilning the quick lime from which they made fertilizer, disinfectant, and paint. By bending Douglas firs, the people of Mesa Verde had got upright poles to become the lintels of the cliff dwellings. By means of fire coppice, the people of the Amazon basin had created a shifting agriculture that enriched the rain-forest soils with slow-to-decay charcoal.
What? I wondered. Hadn’t they denuded their landscapes, destroyed their forests, reduced biological diversity, and caused massive erosion?
No. Because they left the live roots in the ground, they prevented erosion. The landscape was not denuded because the trees sprouted back. Whole suites of creatures joined the rhythm of regrowth, colonizing the coppice and pollard woods. The resulting lands were more diverse, not less. The poetic language of classical Japan enshrines certain key creatures in its word-hoard; six of the autumn creatures so used are threatened by the real estate developments that destroy their coppice woods. In England, beetles, lichens, and other creatures that once inhabited the wildwood now survive only in ancient pollard woodlands.
But don’t the trees soon disappear? I wondered.
No. Coppiced and pollarded trees, it turns out, lived longer than their uncut cousins.
These woods of coppice and pollard around so many villages and settlements were no peaceable kingdoms. Heretics were burned. Rival sects warred. The well-off lived off the rest of the world. Droughts, floods, and plagues winnowed populations. A savvy politico could mine the system for its riches, whether the boss was a hereditary lord, a warlord, a landlord, or a municipal council. But people lived in nature in a way that now we seldom do. Harmony is not the right word to describe it. A better phrase is creative engagement. They lived that way because they knew they had to, in order to live at all, and it was a good way to live, for both the people and the plants. In essence, they learned to talk to trees.
In coppice and pollard, both people and trees were reciprocally active. One acted, and the other responded. When the parties listened and answered, the results created new possibilities for both. One party harvested for its needs, the other lived longer and continued indefinitely upon the land. The relationship cost a tremendous effort on the part of both. To cut a hundred trees, even with a sharp steel blade, was a hard day’s work. For their part, the trees had their leaves stripped from them in whole or in part every few years. Leaves are not decorative. They are the one and only way in which trees can get food. It takes a great deal of energy to replace them all at once, but unless the tree did so, it died.
The relationship could be abused. If you did not let the trees alone for long enough, and cut them again more quickly to get more wood faster or to open new ground for planting, the plants might indeed die rather than regenerate. In the times when the alternative sources of livelihood were few or none, however, the failure of a tree had put a quick brake on excess. When growing populations overwhelmed the land in the nineteenth century, it was the destruction of pollard systems in places like Norway that brought so many immigrants to the United States.
Only when coal began to be mined in quantity and when at last saws became cheaper than axes—that is, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—did this millennial relationship to living wood begin to dwindle. Suddenly, the woods surrounding villages that had been repeatedly cut and repeatedly sprouted since time immemorial (a phrase used throughout the Middle Ages to justify common rights to a coppice or pollard woodland) no longer gave a feeling of security, but a fear that they had fallen behind the times.
John Evelyn, the father of modern forestry, had written in 1664 that pollarding made “so many scrags and dwarfes of many trees, which else would be good timber.” He called those who did the pollarding “unskillful wood-men and mischievous bordurers,” who left trees “a mass of knots, boils, cankers and deformed branches, to their utter destruction.” Many writers and modern foresters took up the chorus. More than a century later, the English essayist William Cobbett summarized the complaint: He called pollards “trees that have been beheaded . . . than which nothing in nature can be more ugly.”
In England, the enclosures despoiled commoners of their common lands, parts of which had been in coppice or pollard. The rich began to make parks. Majestic, untouched trees were prized along the long vistas of these naturalistic forest and meadow confections. In his “Epistle to Bathurst,” Alexander Pope uttered his justly famous maxim “Consult the genius of the place in all.” He was counseling lords to remake their landscape into an ideal nature, shifting trees, building hills, installing vales, and sculpting views to imitate an imaginary, untouched landscape. (Real woodlands were of course much messier than the designed ones.) They invented the ha-ha, a hidden sunken fence, to keep potentially unsightly sheep and cattle at a picturesque distance in the unspoiled vistas.
The often lopped trees of the commons around villages were thought hideous disfigurements, signs of the backwardness of the stupid hidebound country bumpkin. The best idea was to burn them or to cut them down and sell them. “Pollards, which by reason of their decay or stintedness will not, in the course of eighteen or twenty years, throw out tops equal in value to their present bodies,” wrote the up-to-the-minute agriculturist William Marshall in 1785, “should . . . be taken down;—for the principal and interest of the money will be worth more at the end of that time, than the body and top of the pollard; besides the desirable riddance of such unsightly encumbrances.” John Locke himself, in his Second Treatise on Government, had praised the person who enclosed and cleared an acre of land, making it pure farmland, rather than allowing it to continue “lying waste in common.”
Lord Bathurst’s seat at Cirencester Park is still in a tolerable state of repair, and the beautiful vistas framed by uncut woods are certainly a delight to see. The landscape seemed to represent a rapprochement between man and wild nature, but in fact it built an impassible, invisible wall, a ha-ha of the mind and heart. In the older woodlands, man and trees were co-actors in nature, of equal dignity and power. They had to respect and respond to each other. In the new picturesque landscape, man became the spectator of an idea of nature that he himself had made in the image of a primordium that had never existed. If you traveled back to the end of the last Ice Age, for example, it is very likely that the wildwood browsed by large herbivores like mammoths, mastodons, and aurochs much more closely resembled pollard woods than it did our notion of a pristine forest.
Allison and I stood before the snow-whitened outlines of the scalped London plane trees in front of the Metropolitan Museum. She and her colleagues had designed the pollard bosques, based upon European precedents. I honored their work and their trust in us to produce it. Still, I could not keep from thinking I’d done wrong. I felt a confused press at my back, as though Fifth Avenue at six a.m. had suddenly filled with honking impatient cars and buses faced with a detour that ran them right up our backs and over the trees. Evelyn is the father of forestry, Pope one of my favorite poets and garden thinkers, Cobbett a fine defender of the common lands, and Shigo my teacher. They and hundreds more looked over our shoulders and groaned.
What could I do? It was a job. It had been late winter, time to cut the trees. Varna. I had reread my notes, looked at my favorite pollard pinups, remembered that they were living beings, and then we had taken a deep breath and pruned them. Modesty had been rule number one. We had left enough branches so that if one failed, we’d have a backup. We had selected some single branches and some that forked, trying to create the beginning of what might grow into a mature pattern. We had been careful to make sure each got plenty of light. I had reminded myself and my crew that this was not a one-shot event but the beginning of a training process that would take a decade. The pollards could not all at once look like finished trees. We had to begin a conversation.
The more I had learned, the more I felt keenly the lack of a teacher. I have often wished to have beside me a fen dweller from the English Neolithic or a medieval Japanese farmer. He would certainly have been able to tell me how best to prune these trees. But for now, under an untimely March snow, I was more than half afraid that they were dead, dead, dead.
Allison looked hard at the trees, smiled again, and said with a lilt in her voice, “Well, that’s done! Now what?”
I looked at her and back at the white stick figures of the trees.
I said, “Silent prayer.”