In winter, the trees sleep. Beneath Milwaukee’s thin sun, branches rattle in the hard wind and wait for the call of spring. Together, the branches form a blip of an apple orchard on a bus stop corner; across the way is the scream of the interstate.
Unlike the trees, there’s no rest for Jan Carroll: A retired nurse-turned-arborist who, every February, grabs her shears, dons winter gear, and tends to Milwaukee’s urban orchards. Scattered across the city’s vacant lots, the patchwork of fruit trees was mostly planted between 2015 and 2017 by a handful of urban agriculture organizations and city and county programs—a mix of efforts to beautify community spaces, develop local food systems, and counter food deserts and insecurity. Most of these orchards live in the north side’s predominantly Black and low-income neighborhoods. In 2017, the trees—which include apple, pear, plum, and peach—numbered more than 1,600.
Milwaukee’s orchards were planted with community partners, churches, and schools, which agreed to care for the trees. Some did beautifully, Carroll said, but many lacked training and time. “The trees were on their own,” she said. “I call them orphaned orchards.” Carroll had been involved with the orchards as a volunteer with the influential non-profit Growing Power, which planted many of the trees, and she began tending them on her own in the winter of 2017 when the organization shuttered.
So long as you don’t kill them, fruit trees will grow. But people want fruit trees to produce fruit, which requires specific tasks each season. Left to their own devices, trees will sprout a tangle of branches that shades itself out and hobbles airflow, inviting disease. Enter pruning: thinning and shaping trees, welcoming light and air into their crowns so that when they flower, they yield lots of healthy fruit. For Milwaukee’s city-dwelling trees, Carroll also aims to keep branches to a level at which people can pick them easily and safely, without ladders.
In cold climes, the best time to prune is in winter when trees are dormant. The work is mean with chill (Carroll’s uniform includes an undershirt, t-shirt, wool sweater, jacket, neckwarmer, hat, long underwear, double pants, two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves, and Sorel boots). But timing is key. Cut a tree’s branches in spring or summer, and it will use its energy to recover the lost branches—which means less energy going into fruit production. On the other hand, remove dead or dying or vestigial branches in late winter, and come spring the tree will have forgotten its wounds; its energy will surge through the strongest remaining branches, yielding flowers and eventually, fruit.
Pruning is both art and science. There is the when and how of making cuts, but one must also imagine where a branch will grow—a challenge that stretches across space and time. “You’re looking at a branch, saying, ‘Do you have a future here?’ and thinking about how the tree is going to look next year,” Carroll said.
If pruning is sculpture, the medium is live, recalcitrant wood, and the work, necessarily patient. There have been unruly trees, those who lop to the side or erupt into dense, Medusa-like snarls. Crooked trees may fall, and dark, damp canopies attract pests that will turn apples to mush. Carroll removes what the tree can take in one season, and tables her sense for how it should look until the next year when she can tackle it again. Gratification isn’t delayed, but enduring, embedded in the work itself. Make a mistake—it’s fine; “the trees are very forgiving,” Carroll said—and the chance to correct it won’t come for another three seasons.
I asked Carroll what her best day pruning was, and, in true arborist fashion, she said while no one day came to mind, last summer was the best season yet. For six years, she’d cared for the trees. Finally, “this past summer was the first time we actually had any decent fruit production,” she said. Interest in the orchards had surged again, and she had new community partners to work with, including the help of several arborists-in-training from Northcott Neighborhood House, a program that provides job training to formerly-incarcerated Milwaukeeans. Carroll has felt useful, contributing to her city’s neighborhoods, sharing her time and knowledge. The apples and pears were sweet and crisp and within reach, anyone’s for the picking.
Lina Tran is a writer living in Milwaukee. She is currently the news and politics fellow at Grist.
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