Knowing this valley, once one has started to know it, is clearly no casual matter. Like all country places, it is both complex and reticent. It cannot be understood by passing through. It does not, like Old Faithful, gush up its inwards on schedule so as not to delay the hurrying traveler. Its wonders are commonplace and shy. Knowing them is an endless labor and, if one can willingly expend the labor, an endless pleasure.”
(Wendell Berry, “The Nature Consumers”)
I have more pruning to do today, weather permitting. It is that time of year, while the trees are dormant and the air is cold enough to suppress infections in the wounds I inflict for the sake of health and growth. Part survey of the larger shape, and part intimate discernment of the nuances of growth patterns, pruning is a deceptive finesse.
I came by coercion to this annual practice. I don’t mean that someone thrust shears into my hands and compelled me to the orchard; rather that the experts overwhelmed my instinctual resistance. The books, the classes, the simple weight of evidence finally clipped away at my intuitive resistance to this seemingly counterproductive practice of cutting off perfectly good, fruit-bearing branches. What I’ve learned is that too many can create problems. Pruning allows the remaining branches more access to the sun, more airflow to prevent diseases, fewer abrasions from branches rubbing against branches, greater concentration of resources and, in short, greater capacity for the fruit to flourish into better fruit.
Less, it turns out, is more. If you want to bear fruit.
But it isn’t indiscriminate diminishment. It does not serve the tree to whack branches willy nilly. There is attention to be paid; careful observation of branch and bud and fork and direction. More will be cut than seems needful, but there is a point beyond which is too much. Care, then, and patient observation; reading tree and listening for what it has to say.
As with the very land in which the trees are rooted. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) once advised those who would invest themselves in a particular locale:
Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
Less poetically, perhaps, but no less elegantly, David Abram asserts that, “A particular place in the land is never…just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.” (Spell of the Sensuous)
Which is simply to note, with Wendell Berry, that “knowing” this place, once one has started to know it, is no casual matter.
We have lived in this place now 10 years – an almost imperceptible tick in the sweep in time, but a long and settled season in the course of our lives. Indeed, it is the longest we have lived anywhere in our adulthood. We have observed the seasons – how the sun strikes the land differently in winter and summer; where the snow hides and lingers and where it early disappears. We have noticed how leaves fall and which berries persist; which birds catch us by surprise and which become neighbors in their reliable familiarity. We have grown familiar with the rolling slopes; made peace with the hard-packed clay, and learned patience for the gradual and coaxed improvement of it through compost and nature’s own interventions. We have sought not to control, but to participate; to contribute as much as we receive. We have, with varying degrees of success, slowed enough to nature’s pace as to notice its various deaths and resurrections, its vivid evocations and its silent reclamations; its extravagant generosities and its prudent frugalities; its constancy and its lithe adaptability.
There is a particular tree on our eastern edge behind which and ever so gradually above which the sun rises this time of year. Walking out into the early hours this morning to release the chickens, I paused, despite the cold, to watch the wonder of it yet again unfold. I’ve seen it before, of course, but for all its commonness it is, along with the day it heralds, a holy generosity.
The sun, the rooster’s crow, the greeting wave of the prairie grass, the shy flip of the retreating deer’s tail, the fruit trees waiting to be pruned. Seeing, listening, learning, knowing – an endless labor.
An endless pleasure.
