Botanical tattoos

I was asked to give a presentation on tree pruning to a group of gardeners. Commercial Gardeners, so not passionate homeowners or obsessive vegetable growers, this was a talk to a single employer with 50 employees. For most of them being a gardener was a job title, they were accidental horticulturalists, mower drivers and the like; but I knew that there would be a few that had sap running through their veins, there always was. Horticulture is defined as the art or practice of garden cultivation and management, with ‘culture’ meaning something like pertaining to a way of life. For some people, being a gardener was more than just a job, it is a way of life.

Those in the room looked exactly as you would expect; capable, strong, earthy, slightly dishevelled and just a little bit broken. Broken of the body more so than spirit, manual labour does that to people, but it was also one o’clock in the afternoon and they had been inside all day; some of them were gazing longingly out the window and others were seizing to their chairs – energy had left the building and I was my turn to talk.

In the six or eight seconds that it took to be introduced my mind embarked on a journey of its own, a very fast but peculiar journey. When it comes to horticulture, arborists surely sit at the top of the evolutionary tree; I had never considered this before and clearly, it was not the best time to start, but I was on a roll. Arborists crawled from the primordial soup and have quite literally climbed all that way to the top of the tree. There they sit there perched at the top, on the very apex – but it’s a precarious perch and not one for the fainthearted. Arborists know that any moment they could fall, that at any moment younger arborists will force them from their perilous perch. Where had this come from? The queue is long and space at the top is limited, those up there know that their grasp on grace will be fleeting and that the only thing to save them from falling onto the ooze below, is the bodies of those that have already fallen. Grasp on grace… when has an arborist ever been graceful? Even for me, this was a strange thing to thinking about. I began to ponder unsure if I were perched at the top of the tree or sat on top of those that had fallen from grace. In a matter of seconds I had evolved from soup, climbed to the top of the evolutionary tree and was about to be pushed off assuming that I hadn’t already been pushed – but pushed by who and why? I suspect all presenters experience a moment of self-doubt before they go onto stage, but this was something else.

All of those thoughts quickly disappeared as I settled into the job at hand. As far as this group was involved I wanted to talk about the importance of making the smallest pruning cut possible. All pruning cuts make wounds, even the good ones; so if you’re going to wound a plant you might as well make the wound as small as possible. It’s a relatively simple concept to get across as it involves doing less work. Smaller cuts equal smaller wounds. Smaller cuts equal less effort. Less effort equals less work, too easy. Smaller cuts are not technically the best, there is some science and placement to correct pruning cuts, but one thing at a time; harm reduction first then correct cuts once that’s sorted.

Sometimes to reinforce the smaller cut talk, I find it useful to dispel some of the nonsense that exists in the world of pruning. There is so much nonsense around plants and pruning that one has to focus on a single item of silly and not dive into the rabbit hole. I went for the belief that pruning cuts must be angled; that one angles ones pruning cuts so the water will run off and rot will not get into the plant. This belief, like COVID must be stopped, it must be eradicated, removed and confined to the history books as something that once happened; ‘look daddy, it says that back in the dark ages they believed that you had to angle your pruning cuts so that the water could run off – how funny they were back then’. To get this point across, I turn to alcohol. Most people know that wine is aged in wooden barrels, so wood must be waterproof (if it wasn’t the wine would leak out). To direct the audience that way, I have to assume that the wine they drink is not stored in a plastic bag and served out of a cardboard box. Looking at those before me, there were no guarantees so I used the backup argument, wooden boats. All our first settlers came here in wooden boats; they sailed across the oceans in waka or wooden ships to get here. Too easy, if wood wasn’t waterproof the boats would have sunk and nobody would have made it here – not by boat at least. Done. Having established that wood is waterproof, the logic behind angled cuts is pointless (water doesn’t need to run off a pruning cut because wood is waterproof and the water is not going to get into the plant). With that in mind, you can point out that cutting at an angle creates a bigger wound than cutting square (making the smallest cut). Then you can loop it all back to smaller cuts equalling smaller wounds and less effort, and then finally drive the point in by explaining that takes more effort to harm the plant (bigger wounds, more effort, greater harm).

As teaching talks go, I had achieved my goal and reached an obvious conclusion and there the session should have ended. I should have said thank you and goodbye, but alas, I did not; I was about to fall from grace. While talking I had noticed the various inked sleeves and tattooed artworks of those before me, there was not a blank canvas to be seen and most of the work had a botanical theme; leaves and flowers, trees and vines. Some of the tattoos were exquisite, true works of art, but some were not, some were quite… bad. Then before I knew it found myself in the audience watching myself, clearly this didn’t actually happen because I would have told myself to stop. I would have said, “I think you should stop now”, but alas, I did not. The me that I was watching started denouncing botanically incorrect tattoos, saying something like ‘if the leaf or tree inked into your body wasn’t an accurate depiction then it was wrong’. While this was happening 49 of the 50 gardeners were all looking at one person, and that person wasn’t me. I hadn’t actually seen his tattoo but clearly, everybody else had, and I was guessing that it wasn’t botanically correct. But still, I went on, ‘we should point out to these poor unfortunates the error of their ways, we should approach them and, and, and… . And at that moment I realised why arborists fall from the evolutionary tree and I knew exactly where I was, I was sitting on those that had fallen before me, but I hadn’t fallen or was I pushed, I had thrown myself.

• Written for Tree Matters (NZ)