“Arboriculture more than any other profession demands an equal amount of physical and mental work. This is a unique feature of arboriculture. Playing a musical instrument comes close to arboriculture in this way because playing an instrument demands a keen union of mind and muscle. And, again, like playing a musical instrument, arboriculture cannot be learned from a book. You must touch the instrument. You must touch the tree. Both professions take a great amount of study. People who play a musical instrument without ever having professional lesson seldom reach the positions gained by those who do. So it is with arboriculture. Bad habits-music, arboriculture-are difficult to change, but not impossible,” (Shigo, 28)

This comparison that Shigo makes of the arborist and musician really resonates with many of us I’m sure. Arboriculture is in fact an art and a science. The ISA tells us that. All art requires imagination, just as arboriculture does too.

Unlike a painting or a sculpture though, music is much more fleeting of an art form. Consider a live performance: we hear it in the moment, the grandeur of the orchestra and the magic of the acoustics and how it seems to consume and move the audience all at once. It’s very much an experience best suited for the present. Then the curtains fall and it’s over just like that, but the feelings and emotions that the music conveys through a concert can stay with us forever. It inspires us, and inspiration is growth.

Isn’t that too how it is with arboriculture? We prune a tree, take out the deadwood and make critical structural improvements only for the tree to seal up and compartmentalize all of that beautiful art we worked so desperately hard to create? Where will your pruning cuts be in fifty years? What happens to the J-lag and cable when it’s swallowed up in ten years?Think of the arborist as the musician, and the tree as the audience. We play for the tree, note for note, pruning cut for pruning cut, swinging and flowing and descending, all of those hours spent mastering our tools and our rigging, knowing that when the music stops playing, the way the tree feels from that performance will be changed forever. We internalize music when we hear it the same way a tree internalizes arboriculture.

We’ve mastered our tools just as the pianist has mastered the keys. There is no turning and looking to grab the handsaw from the hip or the leg, just one endless swoop to grab and cut and drop the saw back into the scabbard. Like a violinist sawing his strings. We could setup a face cut blindfolded, just like the saxophone player puffs their cheeks up and closes theirs eyes and hits every note just so perfectly and blends the notes into a rhythm spilling out, so too can the arborist spill out stubs and crossing branches and scion riddled with fireblight from the crown. It’s muscle memory, the jumpcut, the lanyard snap, the guitar solo.

There’s classical music, there’s rock and roll, there’s the blues, there’s all kinds of electronic and experimental music. There’s IPM and installation and design and contract climbing and general contracting and research and consulting arboriculture.

There’s no way getting around it. If you want to be great, you have to practice. That’s the old adage in music. It seems more than fitting for the modern arborist as well. You can’t stand in someone’s yard or living room and lie to them about working their trees in the same way you can’t stand on stage in front of thousands of people and lie to them about working an instrument. It all comes down to mastery, whether you’re an arborist or a musician.

Who would have thought that making music and sawdust could be so similar?