Pruning the Sleeping Orchard

The orchard in February is all lines. The bare branches go up and out against a gray sky the way a creek goes through a floodplain — every fork and bend exposed, nothing hidden. The apples of October are a memory. The leaves have been down since before Thanksgiving, long enough for the eye to forget them. The only color is the rust of a missed fruit still hanging in a high fork, dark and wrinkled, a winter ration for the squirrels.

The ground is frozen. The grass snaps underfoot. Along the rows, a three-legged ladder stands in the frost, and a man climbs it with a canvas apron of saws. This is the quiet season of the orchard. No bees, no wasps, no hum of summer — only the pull and stop of the blade and the soft snap of a branch falling onto frozen grass. The crew works the mornings when the cold loosens, because wood at twenty below is glass; it should be cut, not torn.

The man reads each tree like a sentence with too many clauses. Dead wood goes first. Then the branches that cross and rub each other sore in the wind. Then the water sprouts, the straight fast shoots that rose stiff as broomsticks off last summer's cuts and will never bear a fruit that ripens. The saw teeth pull through the bark, and the wood underneath is pale and dry, and the sawdust lands on the snow and stays where it lands. For a moment the air smells of green apple wood, tannic and cold. There is no bleeding, no weeping sap, no rush of liquid from the wound. That is the luxury of February: the tree is asleep, its heartwood quiet, its plumbing empty of the rising water that in a few weeks will push the buds out to leaf.

The Sleep

Dormancy is not death. The tree has slowed itself, drawn its water down into the roots, dropped the leaves that once asked so much of it. The metabolism idles. A cut made now is a wound the tree barely notices — less a wound than a promise, because the tree will roll a lip of new bark over the edge when it wakes, sealing the cut with the same push that makes the leaves.

Cut the same branch in May and the sap climbs into the wound, sticky and wasted, feeding a wet smear down the trunk. The open wood becomes a door for the things that move in warm air: the rots, the cankers, the blight. The blight is the one the older orchardists pronounce with a lower voice. It blackens the tips of branches as if they had been dragged backward through a fire, and it rides on rain, on a dirty blade, on the feet of bees. In February the bacteria that carry it sit cold and inert; a pruning cut is just a cut, not an invitation. The careful crew still wipes the blade between trees, because a blade is the one thing a person carries all day through the orchard, and nothing is ever entirely asleep.

There is a second reason only the deep cold will do, and it is the reason that matters once the ladder is set. With no leaves on the branches, the whole architecture of the tree declares itself. The eye runs up the trunk and out along the scaffold limbs as along the lines of a map. Everything wrong is obvious: a branch cutting back across the middle, a fork that will split in an ice storm, two leaders still fighting for the top of a young tree. June hides all of this behind a screen of green. February lays it bare.

For generations the orchardist daubed the cut with tar or wax, the way a farmer dressed a horse's wound. The newer wisdom leaves the wound open to the air, lets the pale wood dry, and trusts the tree to make its own medicine. What is built in February is a procession of finished wounds, each one a scar the tree will wear for fifty years.

The Shape of the Month

What the blade is making is not a smaller tree but an older kind: the goblet-shaped apple tree of the old American orchards, planted wide enough to drive a wagon beneath, with an open center like a bowl for the sun. An apple needs light on its leaves to sweeten its fruit, and a tree opened at the heart lets the light in all the way to the trunk. The pruning decides the summer in advance — fewer fruits, bigger fruits, cleaner fruits hanging in the sun instead of hidden in a leaf-dark knot of twigs.

Winter pruning is one of the oldest practices of the American orchard, and it carries the whole history of the apple on this continent. The first settlers brought over their grafted European trees, and the apple spread ahead of the frontier because a settler could wait years for a grafted tree to bear, but a seedling might bear almost anything — and almost anything could be pressed to cider. John Chapman planted nurseries in the Ohio valley, not the scatter of seeds the legend prefers, and his trees, grown from pips, were mostly not for eating. They made the drink that oiled the frontier. When the temperance movement set its face against the press, the American orchard turned toward the eating apple, and the winter pruning turned with it, shaping trees for the dessert basket instead of the barrel.

The old varieties carried names like lessons — Baldwin, Northern Spy, Roxbury Russet, Winesap. A grafted tree is a single variety joined onto rootstock, so the winter cut shapes a known character rather than a gamble. But the season of the saw never moved. The fruit is made in the growing season; the shape of the fruit is made in February.

As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

The proverb is older than the Republic, and it was never truer than in apple country.

The Turning

February is the hinge month. Its first weeks are often the hardest of the year, bare and frozen, the light slanting low and useless. Its last weeks carry a false thaw, and then the sap notices. In the milder orchards the twig tips redden at the very end of the month; on the roads the sugar maples are tapped first, but the apple keeps its own time.

The window closes when it closes, suddenly, the way ice goes out of a river. The saw crews leave the same week the buds begin to swell. A week later the cuts would leak, and two weeks later the tree would be answering with a growth the saw would only have to cut back again. Whatever cuts remain unfinished wait for the next February, because the tree forgives nearly everything except timing.

On the last good afternoon of the pruning month, the orchard stands open and corrected. The snow has melted off in a ring at the drip line of each tree, the way it does when the ground has begun to breathe. A last ladder comes down. A blade is folded, wiped, oiled, and hung in the barn with the chains.