California Gardening: Tree Pruning as an Art, 1 by Twincol

Twincol wrote:
I spent nearly $800 last month to prune my two Fruitless Mulberries. I'm actually rehabing them after many years of poor pruning, typical of Fruitless Mulberries in this area. They're often pruned into a single trunk with no shaping main branches, or a trunk with multiple main branches withOUT any other outlying branches. They're most often pruned prior to changing from green to yellow in color. They're pruned in these ways because their owners or caregivers are just lazy and it's horrible to see them. I have two of these and when I finally gained total control over their care I refused to allow them to be so abused and have been working on rehabing them back to their lovely potential. And it has been expensive and it has been iffy to find someone capable of or reasonably-enuf priced to do the work. I finally just bit the bullet and have been working with someone who seemed capable. But this year he left, it seemed at the time, much work to be accomplished and I was so discouraged.

Yesterday there was a guy in my neighbor's yard pruning our shared twistie branch willow (I water it to the detriment of my gardener's lawnmower blades, she pays the price in size and fence damage). We both get to enjoy its visibility over the tops of our homes as we return home from our crazy worlds outside of home. He crawled around my roof several times (the tree was tickling my electrical power line--eeek). I watched him climb up and then down, up and then down, up and then down to look up, study, contemplate the shape and density of that lovely tree. He worked on that tree for more than 4 hours and the end result was magic. Absolutely magic!

And, I got to rescue some twisted limbs for my inside pot. He's coming over over the next several weeks to complete the work on my mulberries and ALSO (hallelujah!) to stump grind some of the rising roots on them.

Let me show you.


Linda