A Maple and a Firethorn (Pyracantha) — Repotting two trees that have come home from an exhibition. Remove the moss, loosen three years of roots with a sickle, and ease the tree out slowly with hands placed at the trunk base. Once the display is over, we return to cultivation. For that, there is a quiet, deliberate movement of the hands.
The Maple that came back from the Gafu-ten still has its display moss in place. That moss, which looked beautiful at the venue, is removed as soon as the tree returns home. We look carefully at the base of the trunk that had been hidden beneath it, as if to check in.
Display and cultivation serve different purposes. Once the viewing is over, the tree returns to being a tree. Display moss is attached lightly, so it slips away by hand — and that, too, is proof it was placed there for the viewing alone.
The Firethorn (Pyracantha) is due for Repotting for the first time in about three years. Even before confirming the root condition by eye, there is already an expectation: «they must be packed in tightly.» A tree vigorous enough to be shown at an exhibition is, by that same measure, living with great energy.
Read before you look. Perhaps that is what experience means — learning to imagine the condition inside the pot from the length of time that has passed without Repotting. When you pick up the sickle with that expectation already formed, something shifts.
Cut away the fixing wire at the pot base, then guide the sickle along the inner wall of the pot. Not pressing the blade in, but sliding it along the interior surface. Working gradually from the edges, loosening roots and soil little by little. No hurry. No force. Layers of roots built up over many years can only be released with time.
Loosen the entire circumference, and only then lift the tree out. That sequence shapes the kind of hands that know how to undo years of growth.
When lifting the tree from the pot, the bark of the trunk must not be damaged. So always place your hands at the base of the branches — where they meet the trunk — and draw it out from there. Support the very point that holds the tree's structure together, with the palm of your hand.
It looks like physical work, and yet it is really the work of where you touch. Not pulling, but supporting — easing the tree out slowly.
Three years of time are packed inside that pot. The hand movements that undo it are, somehow, quiet and unhurried.
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