Of Gardens and Structure: Caring for Oak Spring's Apple Cordons
Thomas Bardroff
In this blog series, Oak Spring’s interns and apprentices share their stories of working and learning in our gardens, fields, forests and farm.
Structure is everywhere around us. It makes up our daily schedules, buildings, and even the miniscule atoms that construct the greater world and universe we all live in. On a much less worldly and expansive scale as an apprentice at Oak Spring, I had the opportunity to maintain and understand structure as it pertains to the garden.
Photo by Thomas Bardroff
Even in the bitterest parts of winter, gardeners find themselves outside preparing for the upcoming season. This is a crucial time for pruning as many plants are in a dormant state and incur less overall stress. The stepover cordons that line the pathways of the formal garden are no stranger to winter pruning. Admittedly, I’ve never worked on a sort of pruning style like this before arriving. Luckily the gardeners here are always welcoming and willing to talk about the garden and how things are done here.
Before you even begin you should have an overall idea of what you’re wanting to accomplish and have an idea of your end goal pictured. Look at your cordon and its growth many years ahead and not just a single growing season. Aimlessly chopping on cordons will leave you with a structureless mess and I dread to imagine the consequences that would cause in the garden. Without getting into too lengthy and riveting a discussion on plant biology, health, and cordons I will instead summarize a few things I noted that were stressed to me when pruning.
Photo by Thomas Bardroff
Ever since my early horticultural learning at Sandhills Community College, sanitization has been repetitiously drilled into my head when pruning was discussed. At Oak Spring, we are no strangers to the dreaded Fire Blight on our apples and pears. So sanitize before and after your work to limit disease potential! From here it’s taking it one cut at a time. While cordons can have many purposes our purpose here is to be aesthetically pleasing, uniform, and have a structure to it. To accomplish this we remove pieces of dead wood, crossing branches, crowded branches, and any branches that are inhibiting your purpose of growth. Always remembering to cut at nodes to prevent dieback, disease, and promote good pruning practice. While a pretty straightforward process it’s easy to drastically change the cordon with a single cut. So at times you have to take a step back and examine your work. I found myself taking a knee and peering around and over the cordons to ensure I was maintaining a general shape and height and removing pieces that didn’t fit in.
So in the garden we always strive for perfection. While few things are perfect we work with what we have and not necessarily what we always want. The overall final structure, to me, takes the appearance of an abnormally shaped rack on a buck. The gray branches of the apple acting as the tines, bending outwardly in every way in a gnarled, knotted, and twisted fashion but with a strong, defined outline and shadow.
Cordons and their maintenance can seem very daunting at first but with proper research, preparation, and time invested it’s a skill any gardener can freely add to their repertoire. But with that being said don’t be afraid to make a mistake when gardening. It is within my belief that in order to learn you have to make mistakes and to make mistakes you must, firstly, try! I’ve most assuredly made bad cuts or killed plants on many people's “hard to kill” plant lists. But gardening, like life, is all a process and surely not one learned in a day.
Thomas Bardroff is a Horticulture Apprentice at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation working with the gardening team.