A Word About Trees

I make my livelihood from trees. My brothers and I are fourth-generation farmers, growing walnuts in the San Joaquin Valley of California. We love caring for the orchards, and we take a lot of personal pride and satisfaction in making the orchards not only productive but aesthetically beautiful as well. Our part of California has been a farming Mecca for generations, but the face of the kind of agriculture being practiced here is changing. The dairy industry is in the middle of a long and deep downturn, and many dairymen are converting their land to almond, walnut, olive and cherry orchards. Cattlemen have been doing the same thing. Fewer cowboys. More orchards.

And I'm not complaining. The orchards are beautiful and they not only dot the landscape--they dominate it.

But it's not just fruit and nut trees that I love. We're blessed in this part of the Valley with an abundance of oak trees. There are White Oaks on the California coast. On the valley floor, we have Valley Oaks. And just a few miles east of here--as you drive into the Sierra foothills--you'll see Black Oaks, and further up in the high country you're likely to encounter Live Oaks, Canyon Live Oaks, and Blue Oaks. One of the biggest oak trees I've ever seen is at the end of the driveway where I grew up--a spectacular Blue Oak that is estimated to be around 150 years old.

Oak trees are fascinating because they have such character. They're gnarled, with limbs that twist and turn. They lack the symmetry of a redwood or a pine. They grow slowly. But they're beautiful and distinctive. And there are still parts of California--especially in the foothills--where one can drive past acres of old oak groves that were likely there when the Mi-Wuk Indians lived among them.

California is perhaps most famous for its Giant Sequoias. The Sequoia is massive. In fact, the General Sherman tree in Sequoia National Park is the largest tree in the world. It's estimated to reach 275 feet high, with a girth of 103 feet in circumference. It is estimated to be at least 2,300 years old. Nearby, the General Grant tree is nearly as big, but it's a relative youth at an estimated 1,600 years old.

Trees are a precious gift, and California is blessed to have such an abundance of beautiful and fascinating trees.

Life Lessons From Pruning Trees

Each winter when the harvest has been completed, we begin the laborious but vital task of pruning the orchards. This is laborious because the trees are so tall that a man must use a pruning tower (similar to what is commonly known as a cherry picker) to get up into the tops of the trees to make his cuts. It's vital because pruning removes the deadwood and promotes growth of fruitwood, making the tree more productive. More on that a bit later...

The pruner has two tools he uses to make his cuts: a shear for smaller cuts and a saw for the larger ones. How he selects what to cut and where is crucial, for he must be able to look at the overall structure of the tree and maximize the growth of fruitwood in the spring while ensuring that he does not weaken the overall structure such that, if a big crop is set in the late spring and into the summer growing season, a heavily-fruited branch may break, thereby losing that portion of the crop he worked so hard to promote.

The guiding influence the pruner must have is to "open up the canopy", meaning that he wants to remove unproductive wood that will shade the interior of the tree more than is necessary. When the canopy is opened, sunlight filters down into the tree's interior, thereby offering the chance for more fruitwood to develop. A fully-shaded orchard floor may be aesthetically pleasing, but it's also a sign that the trees have not been properly pruned during the preceding winter.

The pruner, when selecting his cuts, looks first for deadwood. These are branches that have shown signs of vigorous growth, but without any or little evidence that they bore much fruit. A branch that grew a great crop of foliage again may be aesthetically pleasing, but it does little for the farmer's bottom line. The deadwood is cut away in order to promote the growing vigor from the tree into the more productive and potentially profitable fruitwood.

Often the fruitwood is not as pleasing to the eye as the deadwood; it's more gnarled, it has knobs and spurs which are evidence that it bore fruit there during the previous season. It's usually not as long or extensive, but is more stunted. But that fruitwood is the key to a grower's livelihood, and the grower will do all he can to maximize its development and continued growth. He will prune to allow more sunlight exposure to the fruitwood, and he will give the tree nutrients designed to maximize the tree's vigor and health such that more fruitwood will grow.

By now you've probably already recognized the parallels between pruning fruit trees and living a balanced and productive life. But, at the risk of declaring the obvious, here are the lessons I draw from this:

• When we put our energies into activities and events which are solely self-focused, they make look more aesthetically beautiful to us but they often bear little fruit that benefits others. That makes those things deadwood, and those things must be cut away and removed.
• God told us that He is the light of the world. So when we remove the deadwood and open our canopy, we also open ourselves to His wisdom and strength and provision, and we offer ourselves to become more productive, more relevant, more purpose-driven.
• Like the fruitwood on the tree, there are parts of us that look more gnarled and which aren't as attractive or presentable to the outside world. But the important thing is not what we look like, but what we do and how productive our lives are for the good of others.

The pruning is done now. Very soon, our trees will be blooming and the pollination will take place. And within a few weeks we'll be able to see the first signs of the kind of crop that's being set and how well we did this past winter to remove the deadwood, open up the canopy, and promote the growth of the fruitwood and the fruit that will issue from it.