Ten
Craig
The smell of freshly turned soil is complex. A dry sharp light flavor usually accompanies the scent of pine, while a deep thick wet aroma brings the anticipation of leafy shivering aspens. With just a taste of the dirt blowing in the truck window I could tell you where you were on the mountain.
Potting soil also has a particular profile and its smell says a lot about its health.
A light and fine aroma, like the high mountains but touched with richness, can sustain any plant.
A potted plant with dry sharp scented soil means it’s hungry.
Its leaves are small and pale, and its thin reaching branches, while desperate for any light it can gather, will burn easily in the heart of a full day’s sun.
When I wandered back to Mace and Maize’s nursery on Thursday morning, I already knew Ulrich was at work due to the dry loamy taste in the cold air.
Despite the possibility of getting the medical training I needed, and the great moments I’d had with Rilee, both awake and asleep, the minutes between remained agonizingly empty.
Which is why while staring at the kitchen wall calendar alone in my bare feet, I felt a spark of life when I realized it was Thursday.
Ulrich came to the store on Thursday and I wanted to be there.
The nursery greenhouse door hung open and Ulrich hummed as he moved carefully about, his shadowy shape visible through the opaque walls.
Exiting with a naked eighteen-inch maple in a low dish–shaped red–glazed pot, he came to a stop.
“I was wondering if you’d be around,” he said with his clipped European English.
The heat of embarrassment rushed through me as if I was a child checking out a neighbor’s puppy. Crushing the heat down into a tight ball it just melted into the heavy weight of anger. Before I could search for what to say Ulrich set the maple in place and waved me inside.
“Come. You might find this interesting.”
Shuffling inside behind Ulrich I found a bonsai–shaped juniper on the workbench.
The tree’s branches were trimmed into a cascade design but thick copper wire encircled the main trunk.
Strands of wire reached out around the smaller branches.
My own ankle throbbed beneath my brace just looking at the pitiful plant.
“Is the tree injured?”
“Not at all,” Ulrich said, turning the plant to get a view of the other side before taking his clippers to a tiny collection of pale blue needley fronds.
“It’s being trained.” Setting the clippers down he traced the wire with the tip of his finger.
“The firm wire gives the tree a constant push, bending it as it grows into its shape. As the tree grows it takes its shape more fully. It’s sculpting nature really. ”
“But if you bend a grown tree it will snap in half.”
Running his hand across the lip of the bonsai’s pot Ulrich smiled.
“Tall pines shake in a strong breeze. It’s only the sick ones that break under the strain.
” Then with a large smile he nodded. “But this is best done with a young plant. It is much slower and more difficult to train an adult bonsai, but it is possible. Though I suspect it is not as comfortable for the tree.” Ulrich pulled out his phone, “Here, take a look at this.”
On his phone was the image of a potted sage brush, gnarled, dried and half dead.
It was big, waist high, with some headless figure standing behind it for scale.
Ulrich took the phone back and swiped through to another photo to show me.
In the sage’s place was a thick stemmed wizened tree with tiny silver-gray leaves reaching upward off a thick horizontal beam.
The whole tree was secured in an unglazed dull brown pot.
“Same plant,” Ulrich smiled. “Two years of training and trimming. But it is now a tree that seems ageless.”
“And healthy.”
Nodding he slipped his phone back into his pocket. “Yes, and healthy. It does no good to spend so much effort on your creation just to have it die. The health of the plant is always first, even when it may not understand. Come here.”
With his hurried stride, Ulrich left the bonsai and stalked to the rear of the nursery.
Pointing through the chain-link wall he remarked on the tall twisted honey locust across the street.
“The branches grow inside, like a knot. They are too many and the tree still tries to feed them even though the branches inside grow no leaves. A total mess. Tree needs a good pruning, clear out the inside and leave only the structural branches so the new growth and leaves can grow on the outside. But it doesn’t know it’s not healthy, and would be angry with whoever tries to help it.
Nasty tree with long spines.” Honey locusts were terrible trees, springing up like weeds and long irregular thorns through the whole plant.
“Bonsai is not just art, it is care. And discovery. Come here.” I followed him back to the greenhouse.
Sliding the cascading juniper out of the way he drew another bush still in a plastic nursery pot toward him.
“The art of bonsai is bringing the plant into harmony, with itself, with its pot,” Ulrich touched a finger to a nearby square blue gray glazed pot, “and with the world around. There are some traditional forms, but we always look for something kingly contained in this small package.”
I stared at the little bush, maybe twelve inches high, and could read its past. One side reached upward from growing on the north side of a nursery and having never been rotated it was left with a thin side covered with tiny scrawny arms. Taking this infant, I imagined it in the wild.
Unbalanced, it would tip over on a steep hillside.
Mentally moving it to the top of a mountain I realized its trunk was too healthy to have grown there, no lightning scars, and the trunk itself was both thick and tall, but windswept.
Pulling the tree down the mountainside to the broad saddle between two hills where the wind whipped through, I literally felt the plant’s roots sink into the earth.
“It belongs up a windy valley. Maybe high on the slope at the valley’s entrance.”
Ulrich pursed his lips and rotated the plant first left then right, nodding gently. “Okay. Okay. But it’s a bush not a tree.”
Running my hand across the scraggly side I pinched off a collection of the juniper’s steel blue prickly leaves. “These have to come off–the whole side, so the trunk is exposed. The wind would have stripped off small branches and the rest grew away from the prevailing winds.”
Pressing a pair of clippers into my hand, Ulrich shrugged. “Okay, do it. Take them off.”
“But I-”
“You are the one who sees it, I can’t paint the picture in your head.”
I wanted to say it wasn’t a painting, it was a plant, a living thing, and I didn’t want to ruin it.
But right now it wasn’t a tree, it was just a tiny scraggly start forgotten at the back corner of some nursery.
With a little help it could be more, a brave sentinel welcoming travelers into a sheltered valley.
Gripping the clippers I snipped away a twiggy dry branch, then another.
Keeping the drawing of the welcoming tree in my mind I cleared away not only the weak side of the tree but also around the base of the trunk to allow the tree’s structure to jump into view.
“That is a tree,” Ulrich dropped his fingers from his chin where they had been resting while I worked.
“I see the wind shaping it. But these beams here, and here are out of place.” Gripping the trunk with one hand he gently pulled one branch out and downward.
“Now see how such a subtle move changes this branch into a bough.” And it did.
The space created the illusion of size and literally transformed the bush into a tree.
“Clip the small twigs off this bough, and leave only those leaves sprouting directly from it, and leave nothing on the underside.”
Turning away from me, Ulrich rummaged in a tool box on the floor. The ‘bough’ wasn’t very big and it took just seconds to follow Ulrich’s instructions, but it brought further definition. With each adjustment the tree in my mind became more physically present.
“Now we wire,” Ulrich announced. Taking a roll of copper wire he began wrapping the trunk of the tree in a spiral and then along the now trimmed bough.
As he did so he pulled first one bough into place, and then the second.
When he let go, the branches were braced in place and the entire side of the bush was now a tree.
Handing me the roll with a smile he waved at the plant.
“Now you do the other side. Trim and wire.”
With light fingers I poked and prodded the back side of the bush, rotating it left and then right to get a good look.
I preferred the third branch at an angle and even lower than the others, allowing all three to be visible from either side like three fingers extending.
To do that right would require some trimming of all three branches and the trunk, but it would emphasize the crusty bark of the bush.
Working quickly I trimmed the tree, creating space for the branch I was working on and also shaping the finger shaped canopy. Then I wrapped the lower branch in wire and eased it into place. It was as easy as it looked.
My leg ached and I realized I’d been standing in one spot for too long.
Focusing on the windswept bonsai tree everything else had faded away for a while.
Rubbing my thigh, I stepped back to look at the pruning.
The juniper start was now a tree, plucked off the hillside of my mind and settled on the desk in front of me.
The smooth press of the copper wire still echoed in my fingertips as I rubbed at my thigh and knee, brushing against my brace.
Nodding, Ulrich studied the plant, “Placing each branch at their own height is a nice touch. Adds to the visual appeal.”