But, you may be wondering, how would becoming a Citizen Pruner - however beneficial for my local street trees - contribute to my "Religion of Trees" project? I'll have more to say once I actually hit the streets, but it might be useful to gather some thoughts now.
One of the books which really opened my eyes to trees, Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees, was written by a poet-pruner, William Bryant Logan, but most of the other things I've read approach trees in quite different ways. Some are by botanists and ecologists, describing the inner workings and outer networks of the arboreal, in individual trees and forests. Others are more philosophical and cultural, articulating the ways trees have contributed to human civilization, and how humans have made sense of this. The most compelling emphasize that trees are people with whom human beings have been and again should be in relation. But all of these approaches remain (at least from reading about them) distant, spectatorial. We respect trees by keeping our distance from them. In the first iteration of the "Religion of Trees" class we occasionally touched trees but mostly admired from a distance, drawing rather than, say, tasting. Let alone pruning!
The pruner has an entirely different relationship to the tree, and reveals ways in which trees can benefit from our active interventions. Pruned trees, like the tended clusters of sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer describes, do better because of knowing human intervention. Logan suggests that a coppiced tree can live forever. Without this lived experience, discussion of relations with trees too easily becomes transactional and abstract - they breathe out the oxygen we need, and we breathe out the CO2 they need. As any gardener or farmer can tell you, our involvement is much more involved.
Street trees offer a further level of interest here. They are not fruit trees (or sources of wood for building or burning) but their lives are every bit as human-shaped as those of trees in an orchard. With a few grandfathered exceptions, every tree you see in a city was planted. As I've learned in the Citizen Pruner course, there are all sorts of guidelines and criteria for which kinds of trees to plant and where and for the kind of care they need to thrive. Many, like New York City's eponymous honeylocusts, are grafted varieties. (Perhaps thriving is too much to ask, when you consider the stew of exhaust fumes, dog pee and winter salt street trees have to contend with from tiny concrete-encircled beds distant from their kin.) Even the approved trees need smaller and larger prunings, for their sake and for the sake of the humans who walk, drive and park by them at all hours.
I'm more than a little embarrassed that, for all my oohing and aahing at city trees, I hadn't really taken much of this in. I knew these trees were planted (I knew I knew a few years ago when, on returning to Princeton for a visit, I was amused to find myself wondering at a roadside forest: "who planted all these trees?"). But I was happier, as I've found many of my students are, to forget this. Street trees are trees, wild nature, the non-, the other-than-, the bigger-than-human. Their beauty, their song, their comfort, even their distress are parts of a world beyond the city with its inorganic angles and all-too-human din. They were here before we arrived and will be here when we're gone. Even if initially surprising it's quickly intuitive to think of street trees as parts of an "urban forest" - and not because, as we've only recently realized, every known forest shows the effects of human husbandry.
City people like me don't know what it is to live in intimate exchange with plants, the way farmers and foresters do. And so street trees connote to us not connection but distance, not interdependence but self-sufficiency, not fellow people but whispers of a world without - human - people. Ecological historians have noted how recent (and American!) the idea of "wilderness" is, how it arises from the learned inability to think of the human as part of nature, fuelled by the "omnicidal" legacies of colonialism and capitalism. Perhaps I read too much in here. Don't many city folk have special relationships with specific trees? Isn't that individuality part of the gift of street trees, an individuality not compromised by the sustaining reality of human planters and pruners? I'll need to think more about this, and think while pruning!
But still: what about religion? Since first reading Logan I've been wondering how much the ideas I'm finding in books about religion and trees are shaped by the experience of modern urbanization. (Before the industrial revolution, trees were what cooked your food and kept you warm in winter - and not the fossilized trees from millions of years ago.) I'd already wondered how city folks' distance from orchards had made us forget about grafting - and how this leads us to misread all those tree diagrams of the past as showing natural lineage rather than manmade order. If premoderns' experience of trees was of our collaborators in culture rather than outsiders to (or "resources" for) it, how might that have shaped their thinking about, say, "world trees" and the "tree of life"?
My hope is that pruning consciousness will help me better understand what trees meant to people who had more intimate and dynamic relationships with them, that this will help me better interpret the history of religious representations of trees - and to offer these interpretations as correctives to understandings of trees (and religion!) which make interdependence and intervention hard to grasp, let alone embrace. I'm not sure how much of this I want to be new, rather than recovered. But I do think that thinking about religion with pruner's tools in hand might be fruitfully different.
