There is some thing about ice. It can be so beautiful and yet it can also be destructive. If you've been watching the news this month you will know that the entire northern United States has been dealing with severe winter weather. Here in Oregon we got our share and for the first time that I can remember we actually had a white Christmas. It was not all the movies make it out to be. Any way I was talking about ice. one of the worst things we get some times around here is freezing rain. It comes down liquid and coats every twig and every blade of grass, every power line and every driveway with layers of ice. On the twigs and grass, or walkway lighting, this can be beautiful, at least at first. If enough accumulates things begin to break though. The storm that deposited more than an inch of ice on some areas broke a lot of branches and toppled a few trees here on the campus. Falling branches and trees took out power lines and left our campus and many other people with out power, some for more than five days, thankfully very little damage was inflicted to our buildings or the rest of our infrastructure. As I write power company work crews are still putting in 18 hour days to return power to some locations. It is at times like these when we really learn to appreciate the men and women who's work makes our daily lives and routines possible. It also serves to remind me that what I do here at the campus really is important.
Something else that comes to mind when I think of all of this ice damage,is the way trees respond to having limbs broken off. When they begin to grow again in the spring most of these trees will replace the broken limbs with several new branches. It is a natural form of pruning that either makes a tree stronger or kills it. Jesus spoke of us as vines and taught that God prunes away unproductive parts in order to produce more fruit in our lives. That is the purpose of directed pruning, to strengthen the healthy branches, remove the sick or unproductive ones, and to force the new growth that will produce the fruit that the master is looking for. It is much better for a tree or vine to suffer the directed loss that comes from intentional pruning than to grow as it will, only to suffer destructive breakage from the storms that come.
I have also seen another type of breakage. It was cherry season and the wild cherry trees in the woods were loaded, so heavily that some times the weight of the fruit overwhelmed the branches it grew on and a large part of the tree would break off and fall to the ground. Since the trees were easily forty feet tall this did make access to the cherries much easier for me but it was still bad for the tree. A well pruned fruit tree is not tall or conspicuous. It does not stand above the other trees and may even appear to an untrained observer to be no more than bare limbs. The value is seen when the fruit comes on because the fruit of a well pruned tree is larger, healthier, and more accessible than that of a wild tree.
I guess the question is what kind of pruning are our cherry trees getting,and what are the results?
