As I give birth to this blog post, Leslie Buck tours the US giving talks and promoting her new book “Cutting back”. It’s an account of her three-month gardening apprenticeship in ancient Kyoto, Japan.
This got me thinking about two points.
Two points
One is that the training she received as a gardening apprentice was a collection of skills passed down from one master to another for hundreds of years. And that’s awesome, even if she only stayed for three months.
Two, not every Japanese gardener I met outside of ancient Kyoto was a master gardener. As the country ages, it retrains retired workers as gardeners so they can stay active and productive members of society. I met several of these new gardeners on the Japan Sea coast, in my wife’s home town of Niigata.
My training
When I consider my own landscape training over the years only one person stands out. Let’s call her Lori to protect her identity. She was an experienced landscaper with superb plant ID skills. I have no idea where she got her training but, considering Canada’s 150 year old history, it won’t come even close to Japanese master gardeners.
Still, looking back it was a lot of fun. Usually Lori would descend on my strata sites to help with pruning. And she was a turbo-charged beast fuelled by the onset of menopause. It would take us the rest of the day to clean up the mess she had made. I wouldn’t appreciate those days until much, much later.
Done pruning, she would reach into her handbag which looked like a mini-pharmacy and then drive off. I always wondered if it was safe to drive after consuming pills. For a brief second, menopause looked like a fun problem to have.
Japanese garden masters
Imagine getting trained by master Japanese gardeners as they hand down skills they learned from other masters and so on down the line. Leslie Buck was smart in that she insisted on being placed on a pruning crew. The alternative would have been three months of weeding and cleaning with very little pruning.
Retrained Japanese gardeners
Riding a bike around Niigata city on the West Coast of Japan is always fun. I would check out plants, many of which are familiar to Vancouver area residents.
When I ran into green workers I would ask them about their jobs. Alas, I wasn’t brave enough to ask about their pay. I suspect that these retrained retiree gardeners outside of ancient Kyoto weren’t that well paid.
Money
Leslie Buck wrote her book to show that in Japan pruning is an ancient skill and clients were willing to pay for it. Not so in California where Buck and her colleagues plug away doing what they love even though the cash isn’t really there.
Incidentally, the landscape concept of mow-blow-go came from California where Hispanic workers would be sent out to cut and blow many residential lawns in one day.
Final thoughts
Try to get the best possible training. Seek out professionals interested in sending the elevator back down. As your skills grow, your pay should keep pace. Make sure your improve continuously so that one day you can achieve mastery.
