This piece was commissioned by my own inspiration. As I go through life, I often find overt subjects or themes with hidden lives. I think it is the duty of the writer to reveal these hidden lives. These revelations not only enhance our understanding of life’s many entanglements, but in doing so, bring resolution to our busy minds.

Ryfe Greenwood

Pruning is an act of mechanical maintenance on trees. Mechanical and chemical responses are elicited from the recipient trees from the pruning regimen. These responses can vary from species to species, within a species, within a region, and within respective micro-climates.

At its zenith, pruning enhances life. Not only the life of the recipient tree, but the tree’s human constituents as well. Herein lies one of the greatest intersections known to the natural world: the will of nature in cooperation or tension with the will of mankind. Proper pruning, which is pruning undertaken according to the highest standards of anecdotal and scientific evidence, involves several stakeholders. Nominally, these are the tree owner, the tree, the environment, the public, and occasionally neighbors. Arborists behave in this group as arbiters more than stakeholders. Because if pruning is to be properly performed it must follow authority.

The sole authority in tree pruning is the informed act. Tree pruning cannot be effectively dispatched without information. Specifically, information of the anecdotal and scientific sort. The informed act distinguishes itself by reconciling the variable wavelengths between each stakeholder’s opinions to achieve the enhancement of life. The informed act is proper pruning. Proper pruning is a collective assignation determined in part by advocacy for the quietest voice among all stakeholders: the tree. Professional arborists care about what the tree has to say. This dialogue forms the basis of tree care as well as the love between an arborist and the trees under their care.

Conversely, the informed act calls out the unsterilized, uninformed butchery as malpractice. Malpractice is improper pruning. The only stakeholder in improper pruning is the transaction. When the transaction dictates the pruning regimen, trees become less like trees and more like ligniferous cairns, mournfully hearkening, with their butchered limbs and graceless structures, to the great schism between the environment and mankind. A schism where life is not enhanced nor the belief in its possibility upheld. A schism wherein the raiment of every fallacy, such as greed and the purity of the human will, cloaks every defiled act as right.