Why I Oughta...

With multiple visits to Tokyo now under my belt, I have come to realize that there are plenty of things that I am drawn to during my stays including the hospitality, the crazy products, work (of course) and maybe most significantly:  their horticulture.  Mostly their trees. I've posted a bunch about the trees of Tokyo starting with my first visit where I saw the Cherry trees in full blossom in 2017 .  Earlier this year, I posted some photos from a Spring visit where I saw some workers pruning street trees into a columnar shape and had the good fortune of seeing the deciduous trees without their leaves.  I also posted this photo of a carefully crafted pine tree outside of the Peninsula Hotel close to the office I was visiting.   The pruning they do starts young as I found a few very thin pine trees close to a building that have begun their pruning/training.   And...where I saw the most interesting collection of trees (mostly White and Black Pines) was in the outer gardens of

This is a photo I took from my cab one early morning that shows off some very large street trees in Tokyo that have been heavily pruned.  I've posted about street trees like this before here .  But, if you look closely behind those larger parkway or street trees, you'll see some smaller, very thin conifer trees that have been trained or pruned to be long and leggy in the style of the larger spruce/pine trees that I saw in the Imperial Gardens.  Remember that photo of a beautiful tree that I posted from outside the Peninsula Hotel ?  I think these little trees might be on their way towards something like that one:  a big, strong singular trunk that can be wired to create some of that curvature and longer limbs with needles clustered on their tips.  Scroll down on this post from my last trip to Tokyo where I visited the Imperial Gardens and you can see more of these mature conifer trees. #8 on my 2019 Garden To-Do List is to plant more conifers .  I know I want to look at