Cutting Back

by Leslie Buck

  Just as a curious passenger in a boat cannot see where the winding river leads, the visitor entering this garden could not see the whole path at once. The path meandered softly for a while, then turned sharply behind a short bamboo fence at the last minute, blocking a view to the front door. I felt pulled forward along the stone walkway to resolve the mystery. The path did not zigzag like a drunken sailor from one side to the other, nor did the stones greatly vary in shape or color in an exaggerated attempt to look interesting. Instead, I walked along good-sized flat stones, easily navigating the bends in the path, glancing around while I headed toward the front door on my brief but satisfying walk through nature.

  Many features of a naturalized garden suggest direction. A pine tree slanting right guides the visitor right. The see-through essence of a pruned laceleaf maple entices curiosity. Bushy shrubs screen the air-conditioning unit, discourage closer inspection, and encourage moving along. Plants, interspersed with large stones, allow for a sense of depth that may not exist in a short front-yard garden. A simple trick such as planting a wide-leafed rhododendron near the beginning of the path, and then a small-leafed azalea toward the end, gives strollers the feeling of being drawn into a scene, as though they were walking with a huge magnifying glass. Just as a painter uses tricks to turn a plain canvas into an imaginative world with depth and perspective, the Japanese gardener uses plants, and long-term styling, to turn bare soil into a journey surrounding the visitor.

  But a garden craftsman must use more than tricks to create a powerful garden, just as a technically skilled painter does not always make a great artist. I once renovated a small path for an American client who was over ninety years old. She told me she often walked a specific direction through her garden, from her beat-up garbage cans down a path to reach a favorite natural streambed. From the garbage cans, the stream wasn’t visible. Because of budgetary constraints, she’d asked me to use only items from the property to do a little renovation. I found a small concrete statue of a bunny behind one of her bushes. It looked as though it had been part of her garden for a while but had been forgotten. I placed the bunny on a flat stone right next to a step midway down the path. I led my client to the beginning of her path, the garbage cans, and she looked toward the step suspiciously for a while because her eyesight wasn’t very good. Then she gasped, “My sweet bunny! I thought I’d lost it years ago!” and she walked without further prompting down the path toward the stream. My attempt to draw her forward had worked. But also this object had touched her heart. Now, on her way to her streambed, she had an old friend to greet her, to guide her to her little oasis. A special rock, plant, or color can draw a viewer into a naturalized garden scene just as well as, and much more subtly than, a concrete bunny.

  Reused material can add a feeling of age to a garden, if it’s not too distracting. I’ve seen old concrete or terra-cotta roof tiles used in the gardens of Kyoto. Age in a garden adds temporal depth and can bring out a story. In a samurai’s garden in Kanazawa, Japan, I once came across a short tree with a four-foot-wide trunk. At the top of the tree, braces of wood and rope held in place rotting stubs. The garden caretakers had taken care of the dead part of the tree as much as the living. I tried to guess its species but couldn’t, and finally searched in the garden’s brochure. It said, “Central to the garden stands a crepe myrtle, over five hundred years old.” I’d never seen a crepe myrtle with more than a one-foot-wide trunk; no wonder I hadn’t recognized it! I wanted to wrap my arms around the myrtle’s marbled bark and climb up to wrap a few safety lines around the stubs myself.

  Many of my American clients move into new homes, cut down old, seemingly useless trees, and plant their contemporary favorites. They celebrate flowering cherries in spring and harvest organic apples in summer. But they miss out on the thought-provoking stories told by trees such as the samurai’s crepe myrtle. Who saw that tree over the past five hundred years? Which kids had climbed it? Who had fallen in love under it? Or dueled to the death? Perhaps the samurai had looked at the tree every morning as he’d exited his home, or shot it with arrows to practice his archery. People had some four hundred years to cut it down, but no one had. I’m not against cutting down all trees, but certain ones have so much heart because of their age.

  Old pines, podocarpus, and camellias lined the secret Kyoto garden path. Over the years craftsmen had pruned these trees so they did not shade the rest of the little garden too much. But the pruners allowed each plant to grow tall enough to look natural to the untrained eye. Even though the landscaper and pruners used tricks to manipulate visitors, the scene looked untouched. Japanese gardens reflect nature, particularly natural scenes that touch the heart, the special scene that you just can’t forget, like the huge, weeping tree offering shade after a long hike, or the meadow at the foot of a mountain, with tiny wildflowers pushed by gentle wind.

  In the private Kyoto garden hidden by a fence, the homeowner would view the garden on the way home. In theory, one could bring a chair outside in the sun and rest one’s bare feet on the soft moss under the shady podocarpus tree, although this is more likely how a Californian would behave. Enclosed, the garden felt intimate, embracing, and maternal. Tree branches hung over the path, creating a womblike ceiling of green canopy.

  The men led me around the side of the house. The landscape altered dramatically, with a backyard that appeared to be under renovation. Paths had been taken apart, and stones mounded to the side. The men dug a new path with shovels and tied certain trees with red plastic ties. “Leslie, cut down the trees with the red tape,” Kei instructed me. No pruning today, I sulked. I had only a few weeks left with the company before my return home. Part of me wanted to learn more, while another just wanted to retreat from the cold. Each morning that week, as soon as I figured out how to keep myself warm with new socks or a different hat, the temperature would drop further.

  The garden behind the house was like a disaster scene, with trees overgrown and strangling each other. Someone had planted the garden carefully, but it hadn’t been pruned or styled for many years. Yet, similar to a stray dog, gardens that required a gardener’s help often look this way at first. With a little design work, thoughtful pruning, and tending of the plants, it could eventually look as lovely and comforting as the beautifully enclosed front garden. Even the smelliest, most flea-ridden old dog becomes fluffy and perks up with some food, a bath, and a little love. Quite often, when I first approach a stray-dog tree, neglected and unappealing, I say to myself, Why me? Why can’t I get better plant material to work on? I’m not a natural lover of stray dogs. Yet I know deep down that every tree or garden has its own beauty that can be revealed with pruning and nurturing. Even if it has only a smidgen of beauty, it’s there.

  I looked over at a rather weedy spot and saw something that stilled my ruminations. I had been searching for it for weeks. In a shady corner of the garden stood a rather messy fir tree, about nine feet tall, shaded out by a larger tree overhead. The fir had a shiny plastic red tie around its neck. I’d found it, the perfect Christmas tree. I’d been on the lookout for a tree or branch I could cut down and use as a Christmas tree. None were sold in Kyoto. But of all the jobs we’d visited over the past two months, not a single one of them had a tree, or even a branch, that I could use for a planned celebration. I touched the fir needles to make sure it was real. Stay calm, I told myself.

  Maya and I had been hard at work over the phone for weeks, strategizing holiday plans. We both thrived on social gatherings. In college, my politicized Berkeley friends and I complained that the Christmas spirit had been corrupted by commercial interests. So I’d tried various ways to downplay the holiday’s significance, such as refusing to purchase Christmas trees. Instead, I’d use cut branches from my gardens or find a tossed conifer from the dump, my favorite environmental alternative, and make it into a tree. Most of them ended up quite lopsided. I maintain this habit even today. A leafless winter branch of the red-stemmed Sango- kaku maple makes an outstanding Chri
stmas tree. Wrapped with white lights, it looks like a winter deciduous tree in a snowy, star-lit forest.

  Despite my reluctance to revel in all that is Christmas in America, I yearned for a Christmas in Japan. I searched for my Christmas branch in every garden we visited. But the Kyoto gardens were just too perfect. All branches had been painstakingly developed for fifty to one hundred years. I had almost given up hope, until I saw the little abandoned fir tree in the back of the secret garden. It was the perfect orphan we could love. Back in California, I reserve the most beautiful cut branches for an ikebana teacher I know, dropping them off at his house late at night on my way home. In an arrangement for a museum or memorial, a beautiful dying branch has one last chance to shine.

  But how to get the Kyoto fir tree over to Maya’s house? I knew it would look odd for an apprentice to ask any question, much less request a favor. The men always appeared hardworking, never greedy. I decided to let them throw it in the truck without knowing I wanted it, then just remove it from the debris pile once we returned to the office. About half an hour later, as I was focused on setting stepping stones, I turned around and saw Kei and Nishizawa cutting branches off the little fir so they could lay it flat on the debris pile! Shocked, I ran over thinking, Get your hands off my tree, for God’s sake! I barely resisted tackling them or throwing myself over the debris pile to save it. Instead, as I neared, I got their attention by just looking intently at them for a few seconds. This worked. I asked softly, “Oh, can I keep that?” I could have just finished a yawn. “Yes,” they responded, their faces blank, not wasting time by asking me why. They threw the tree aside, a bit too roughly for my comfort, and continued working.

  Later, back at the office, I sifted through a huge debris pile to find my treasure crushed between a one-armed Podocarpus gracilior and an overzealous Fatsia japonica. I dragged it off like a thief, as it was quite dark by then, and left it behind a toolshed, figuring I’d deal with it the following day. I had no idea how I’d get it home, and prayed all evening that no one would find it in a cleaning fit and chop it into little pieces before morning. I just couldn’t figure out how to tell everyone in the office, including the head of one of Kyoto’s top landscaping companies, “Leave the dead tree alone; it represents a deeply held American symbol of Jesus and presents.”

  That evening, Maya told me over the phone, “No one has a car—how can we get it back to my house?” Most of her professional Kyoto friends used bikes and the efficient Kyoto bus service. During the midnight anxiety session, an idea came to me, and I contrived a plan. I concealed my contraband smuggling equipment in my workbag the next morning. I could barely wait for the end of the day. As soon as I stepped outside the office door, dusk settling in, I ran behind the shed. There lay my misshapen tree, with all its glistening branches shooting out from its slender trunk. I breathed a sigh of relief. It takes at least three months after a conifer dies in the ground for its needles to turn brown. The conifer’s insistence on life makes me admire it all the more.

  I pulled an old white sheet and some rope out of my bag and cringed, but I knew what I had to do. With my lips pressed together, I sawed four feet off the bottom of the fir. A small tree was better than no tree. I slowly pressed the side branches as tightly against the trunk as I dared, remembering what Mas taught us in bonsai class: if you move branches very slowly, they will bend without snapping. I wrapped the rope around the pressed branches and rolled the whole package up in a sheet, tying it up until it looked like a fat five-foot-long joint. I figured I’d just carry it on the bus. What would anyone say? The word no hardly exists in Japanese.

  Stepping on the first bus, barely able to breathe, I handed the bus driver my coupon and hung tightly onto my mummy. Perhaps the people on the bus would simply think, The crazy American is at it again! The driver remained expressionless as I passed him. I dragged the tree to an open seat and acted as though it was normal to block the aisle with what looked like a dead body. When I repeated the whole transaction on the second bus and sat down with my cargo, I got an appreciative glance from a young man in the row next to me. I danced jubilantly inside my head but tried to look normal till I exited.

  As I unwrapped my package at Maya’s, three Americans and one Japanese stood speechless. Kei had joined us, as he was best friends with Maya and had a curiosity for all things American. My friend who hadn’t seen a Christmas tree in eight years was there. Kei helped by cutting the base of the pine flat with his Japanese saw. He worked with craftsman speed and sacrifice in Maya’s freezing enclosed courtyard, building a stand according to Maya’s steady flow of directions, while we watched through the windows, inside the warmth. No one had ornaments stored in their attics. But within two hours, the tree was covered from head to toe with strung popcorn, newspaper streamers, and meticulously folded origami cranes. The paper birds spun energetically each time someone opened the front door on the windy evening street. Their colors lit up a tree that needed no Christmas lights to brighten it.

  Sunday’s Christmas Eve dinner finally arrived. We all were swept up in the moment, playing charades around Maya’s short kotatsu table with a view of the magical tree, savoring clafoutis, French custard made with extraordinary Japanese organic milk and butter. Japanese cows live the opposite life of the craftsmen, resting in meadows and munching on grass, instead of running in landscapes and pruning most plants in sight. The Christmas tree had been placed in Maya’s tokonoma, where it represented more than what I had previously seen as the inevitable commercialism of Christmas. I saw that occasionally a dream could come true, thanks to a bit of whimsical creativity. I realized the Christmas tree represented depth in time, like an older tree in a garden. The fir tree connected me to my family and friends past, present, and future. I could almost touch the tree that my now-deceased grandmother had touched, and all the ones my future family, friends, and I would adore. It didn’t need to be the biggest, brightest, or newest tree to be cherished. We all sat together on the straw tatami mat looking at the tree, which leaned a bit to the left. The little fir brought us together.

  I woke up the next morning with a Christmas Day chalky mouth, feeling exhausted. I wasn’t used to getting to bed past nine, much less eleven. It had been a while since I’d felt warmly surrounded by friends, so I could barely get myself to exit my warm cocoon for a Monday workday. By noon on Christmas Day, the crew and I had already felled four eighty-foot conifers off a steep mountainside. Rest never lasted long with the men. The company owned land on the western edge of Kyoto Hills, where they harvested timber for profit.

  We met Toemon Sano, the elderly father of Shinichi Sano, the active leader of the company, on the mountain. At eighty-three, he’d lived forty-eight years beyond my age that winter, so I bowed to him deeply, wondering when he might retire full time. He walked over to a large tractor with a backhoe, jumped in the driver’s seat, and took off up a steep mountainside, out of sight. My regular crew had left Saturday for their out-of-town work trip, so I worked with a completely different crew made up of Toemon; a senior employee, Saito, whom I hadn’t seen since my first month at Uetoh; and a few new faces.

  A short, dense man with a chain saw approached us. He looked to be about eighty-five, with cropped gray hair and wrinkles like the cracks of baked earth—a Japanese Santa Claus. I rarely saw elders working in the States, much less in the physically demanding profession of an arborist. Then I was introduced to his wife, who looked to be about eighty-eight and sported her own chain saw. I gazed at her with keen interest, and she stared back, sizing me up. She muttered something in Japanese. I understood. She’d said under her breath, “Onna no ko,” a young girl. I felt a touch of pride and fascination. I imagined what it would be like to work fifty more years. Everyone ran off in different directions, beginning work. I looked over at the wiry white-haired woman and told myself, Well, Leslie, I have no idea what you’re supposed to do here, but you’d better move five times faster than she does.

  Saito eventually motioned for me to f
ollow him up the mountain carrying ladders, cables, and rope. He and the man who looked like Santa Claus signaled for me to fetch cables while they set up a complicated maze of ties to direct the trees as they were chainsawed. Running, as we always did, I scrambled and stumbled through the dense underbrush on the steep hillsides, bruising and nicking my face and wrists. Despite the freezing temperatures, I was exhilarated. The heavy scents of the conifer trees refreshed me, and for once it didn’t seem so cold. I love wild nature and feeling the pines playfully scratching my cheek. I felt at home in the forest on this Christmas Day.

  I suspected that the new men in my crew had decided to treat me cautiously, or rather, like a girl. They gave me light branches to carry and ordered me not to climb ladders. Of course that made me run even faster. One time I had a cable in my hand and ran straight toward the arborist’s handmade worn wooden ladder. Someone needed to climb it to attach the cable to the tree. Saito yelled out from a distance, “Dame, dame, abunai! No, no, be careful!” But I pretended I didn’t hear him and darted up the ladder, its rungs rounded from years of use, as fast as I could, before they could reach me. No one could stop me from climbing a possibly hundred-year-old ladder. Besides, how hard is it to climb a ladder? The arborist said something to Saito, mentioning my name. Then I heard Saito tell the old man I was twenty-eight years old. For once, I had no problem remaining silent, being thirty-five years old at that point.