Ted Kipping’s business card identifies him as ‘Tree Shaper’. The notion of tree shaping is interesting in itself – moreso, for instance, than ‘tree pruner’, and, certainly, infinitely moreso than ‘tree topper’ – , but it also suggests someone with skills, interests, and sensibilities that are more far reaching. This suggestion is borne out in a book called Gardening from the Heart, edited by Carol Olwell, which contains brief autobiographical sketches by various special gardeners. Ted describes himself as a ‘Terminal Case’, which he explains is ‘a person whose profession became an obsession’. The editor’s description of Ted confirms that he has a horticultural background which expands considerably on his occupation as ‘Tree Shaper’. We learn that he ‘is a master horticulturist by passion, a paleo-ecologist by training [at Columbia University], and a tree trimmer by trade’. With information apparently provided by Ted himself, she goes on to explain that ‘he began working with trees and plants almost by accident and discovered he couldn’t live without them. His quest to learn everything he could about plants and trees has taken him all over the world’. Ted, she says, has an ‘almost encyclopedic horticultural knowledge’. ‘Tree Shaper’ indeed!

But in fact, ‘tree shaper’ he is. ‘I love pruning,’ he says. ‘I absolutely love it’. Ted began his horticultural career working at the Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, when he had merely an interest in plants. His interest became an obsession later, as he began ‘frantically studying about horticulture, and found I really liked all sides of it, the cultivating, propagating, landscaping, and so on’. His study of paleo-ecology taught him ‘how quickly some creatures disappear in the geological clock, and how little it takes to alter things, so it teaches you to appreciate what we have’. His horticultural work, then, has concentrated on enhancing the natural objects with which he works, and, while he applies this principle to all aspects of horticulture, he has found he is best able to satisfy himself in the pruning and shaping of trees and shrubs. He looks back on high school woodworking classes and a sculpting class he took at Columbia appreciatively. ‘All those things’, he says, ‘taught me to train my eye and to tune in, because when you’re pruning you’re sculpting with time and the life force of that particular plant’. Being obsessed, he appropriately keeps returning to his obsession: ‘It gives me a real pleasure to prune, to see a tree cleanly groomed and dancing in its own space. I want to enhance as many trees as possible. I want to see as many flowers and shrubs planted as possible. I really want to see the world beautified. That doesn’t mean destroying what we’ve already got; sometimes it means awakening people to the potential that’s already there. I want to make each thing the best thing I’ve ever done. That makes it fun and keeps the learning curve high’. Expressed in distinctly western terms, there is still something of Zen, or at least of a Japanese spirit, in much of what Ted Kipping says, and does. There’s also something of the poet in his sensitivity to his work.

A contributor to several horticultural publications, consultant to the University of California Berkeley Botanic Garden, the University of California Davis Arboretum, the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum, Strybing Arboretum, and the Denver Botanic Garden, Ted has written to me that he ‘did not believe [he] had a topic worthy of [our] audience’s focus’. But he changed his mind when I suggested he speak on woodland gardens: on, as he says in his reply, ‘how to get more light to your gardens and enhance the look/character of the overshading trees – well, I could happily proselytize for hours about such a subject!!’ So we can expect at least an hour of such enlightenment the evening of March 21st – the equinox, appropriately enough, when Ted Kipping speaks on ‘Rhododendrons in the Woodland Garden’. And we can expect it from one of the most erudite, and modest, of ‘tree shapers’.

Ted Kipping