Botanical tattoos
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
Pruning – one size does not fit all
When it comes to plants every man with a dog and retired lady who makes tea has a ‘how to’ on pruning; some of these are good, some of these are not that bad but most are just wrong!
No secret to planting
I had been planting trees and shrubs for over 20 years and I didn’t realise that poor planting was such a problem - but clearly, it was then and it seems that it still is.
The age of wisdom
New Zealand finds itself in a fascinating point of arboricultural time
What’s so hard about soil
When I was a young horticulturalist each and every soils teacher seemed to say something along the lines of ‘soil is soil and dirt is what you get under your fingernails’, some of them would go on to say that they were taught that, but it ‘reflected their sediments exactly’ – and they wondered why ...
The journey to good
A journeyman is an old-school term for a worker who is skilled in a given trade, someone that had completed an apprenticeship but had not yet mastered their craft. A journeyman was someone who had spent enough time working on their craft to have gained a qualification but needed to spent time working in their ...
When 5, which is 6 becomes 8
I have a wisteria that grows and grows, but where it goes nobody knows. I train it and shape it to follow a plan but it still it grows to follow its nose… and I don’t know why. As a self-respecting arborist, I dislike vines – with the exception of grapevines and hops, but I ...
Be properly amazing
New Zealand Arborists can’t prune. For some, a generic sweeping statement like that will be offensive, but some will agree. If you’re a kiwi arborist, and you’re offended, it’s probably because you can’t prune – this, you may well find offensive, yet others will probably still agree… Don’t get me wrong kiwi arborists are amazing ...
Carbon in the time of Covid
This actually has nothing to do with Covid-19 or Cholera, which the title is very loosely taken from. If you cast your mind back a few months, the world was fixated on carbon-sequestration. It seemed like every few weeks another tree planting programme was announced; a million trees here, ten million trees there, a billion ...
Zen and the culture of pruning
The Skype meeting was tedious and I found myself checking FaceBook. Checking FaceBook out of the corner of my eye; one can never look away from the camera during an online meeting. A discrete click, a sly scroll and ‘Pruning is cultural not scientific’, that’s worth a read. Pruning is cultural not scientific, I’m sure ...