Landscape Pruning— Year Eight

When I began bonsai styling I little imagined it would become a career— rather it was a series of experiments I felt compelled to undertake with the trees themselves  as my guides. After a few years I began to see the pruning of landscape garden trees as a natural extension of how the trees teach me about form and structure— the elements of “living sculpture” that are so enchanting to the viewer of Bonsai.
Now eight years in as a professional pruner, with over three hundred Japanese maples and a myriad of other species under my hand in these environs, I have more confidence in my gifts and experience in revealing the tree within the tree— the secret and daring sculptural presence that is a specimen tree lovingly coaxed into its fullness in the Japanese aesthetic of pruning. My trees are my ongoing teachers, and show in their winter profiles the effects of my intuition— like a wordsmith crafting a poem I create poetry in the landscape. I can recognize them years later by the particulars of their shapes and the choices made to open their limbs to light and growth, under the sky and wind of our Pacific Northwest seasons.