RCG-I Seasonal Salon Summer Solstice 2006

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All the While

Ritual from a Guardian Perspective

Wine Parables: Pruning

MONEY: My Own Natural Energy Yield

Connections in Time

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Pruning

There they were: the vines, at last. Two years of planning and learning were behind us. The vines had arrived.

Gingerly, I cut the packing plastic and pulled them out. I know what living vines looked like, both pruned and unpruned, the former a constrained “T” stretched along taut trellises, the latter a torrent of leaves reaching up into the crowns of trees. But these were neither. Bound by sisal rope, they looked like bunches of dead twigs. Each grayish-brown bare-root vine was perhaps twenty inches tall and had strings of roots that length again.

To plant the vines, I was to make a mound of dirt at the bottom of a hole about 18 inches deep. I was to arrange the roots like a sunburst, then refill the hole with dirt. Not much different from planting a shrub, that part. But before I could plant, the instructions declared, I had to prune.

For wine-grapes, pruning goes on constantly. Because grapes bear on year-old wood, an unpruned vine will lengthen and lengthen, growing into the mass of twisted wood that people use to make wreaths. Near the top, a few grapes will be borne, too few to be worth one’s while. So wine-growers prune back the vines severely, allowing only two branches or “cordons” to develop, one bearing this year’s fruit, the other preparing for next year’s harvest.

Knowing all this, I had no hesitation in following the instructions to prune the branches down to nubbins. I prune my trees and shrubs constantly. Last year I renewed an overgrown forsythia through drastic pruning, so that it burst forth in yellow confetti this spring. I do not worry that I endanger a plant when I cut its branches.

But the vines needed more than top-pruning; I also had to prune the roots. I understood the reason. Cut roots spur growth as the plant releases growth hormones in response to the wounding. Trimming roots jump-starts the growing process, encouraging the vine to cast strong roots into the soil of its new home.

I knew this only in theory, not in practice. Of the scores of trees and shrubs that I have planted, none have ever required root-pruning. It felt somehow more violent than pruning the brown tops of the vine. The roots felt soft and supple. Cutting into them, I knew I was cutting living flesh.

I offered an apology to the vines that sounded for all the world like my father’s “this hurts me more than it hurts you” before he spanked us. Then I picked up the first vine and pulled together its roots like my mother used to hold hair before cutting, to even the strands up. A single snip of the blade, and it was done. Into the hole and on to the next.

It did not take long to become efficient at the task, but I never grew to like it. I am tender about roots: I move infrequently and with loud complaint, I find my way in new places only after a period of unease, I hold on to things and habits far too long. Yet when, despite resistance, I find myself in a new job, a new home, a new relationship, the world opens up. Growth I had never imagined suddenly comes easily. The incrustations of habit fall away and, for a time, I feel young and fresh.

My vines may look like brown twigs, but they are surging with growth that comes from sudden, even painful, contact with the new. From that first moment their cut surfaces touched our red soil, they reached out to embrace this land.