Join Shantree Kacera and Sasha d’Harmony for a unique Earth Day weekend experience. Shantree will take you on a tour of the forest gardens at the Centre on Friday evening.

Over the weekend, you will have the opportunity to learn how to promote healthy, productive and disease-free trees. You will be taught introductory and advanced tree pruning techniques, and their significance will be explained. This yearly renewal ritual is a hands-on approach to tree care that you do not want to miss.

“An intuitive pruner works in several years at once; pruning .. is like time travel, projecting years ahead as you see the fruit and how it grows in response to our attention and choices.”
- Michael Phillips, author of The Holistic Orchard

You can see a forest garden in the making at “Pearadise.” It is still in the early transition from an old pear orchard to a forest garden. Here, we are helping the trees regain shape after years of wildness. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the Apple Forest Orchard and one of the oldest  Medicine Wheel Herb Forest Garden Forests in Canada, where yearly pruning has been done for over 45-years.

Different maintenance-based care is needed in his case. Learn about it all and connect with the trees and nature while sharing stories and anecdotes about some of our favourite fruit trees. Pruning trees, berry bushes, brambles and vines is an art and a science. From an artistic perspective, a discerning eye is needed to evaluate a shrub, understory small tree or a mature tree.

Pruning is an ancient practice that involves shaping nature to make it more productive and meet human needs. This practice dates back to ancient Roman times, and the Italian verb ‘potare’ comes from the Latin word ‘putare’, which means to cut, sever, trim, or clean.