Admidst dire geopolitical news I've been working my tail off. It's been an unusually wet winter here; the chill and damp combined with exertion landed me in bed with the flu this week. From yesterday I was feeling better, and, undeterred, I'm writing. Having dwelled perhaps too long on Germany's economic woes and the collapse of transatlanticism, I'm turning my attention back to the local and tangible: Poggiosole's land and its olive trees.
Back in September of 2022 my post "Worthy Additions" included a photo of a 6-meter tall Leccino in the sloping eastern section of our upper grove that, as the caption indicated, hadn't been pruned in years. The plan then was to revitalize all our upper grove trees, starting with a "reforming" per the polyconic vase method (more about that below).
We followed through with that plan and the pictured tree got a big haircut in May of 2023 at the hands of Vittorio Ancillotti, Poggiosole's master pruner. May is very late for pruning a fruit tree, even the late-blooming olea europea, but when you are reforming a plant you do so knowing it will yield next to no fruit for at least two years. So Vittorio said May was sort of okay, and that anyway he'd hold back some.
You wouldn't know it. Two-and-a-half years and two annual prunings later the tree is only recognizable by the shape of its three primaries. The upper third is gone, and most of its leaves are either at or below the mid-line of its recovering canopy, which has been noticeably flattened. That tree wasn't going to win any beauty contents before reforming, but it's hard to deny that Vittorio did it no favors where looks are concerned. Granted, the tree was, from an agricultural point of view, pretty far gone when it first met Vittorio's secateurs: it was in no shape to offer a crop of olives at a height from which they could be easily harvested. Still, there's no denying that reforming old olive trees is a radical act.
Search online and, as of today, you won't find much about polyconic pruning. Forget YouTube; I've tried. There's an 2022 article hosted on the website of the Podere La Marroniaia (located near Siena) that has some useful illustrations, but muddled language. By the end of that article it's hard to tell what exactly distinguishes the practice of polyconic pruning from other, more traditional methods. Another, newer article hosted on the website of L'Olivo News is more informative and specific but, looking as if it has been translated into English word-for-word from a rather academic style of Italian it makes for tiresome reading, even for deeply interested eyes like mine. After cutting and pasting the most relevant middle section below, I've corrected grammatical lapses and the occasional stylistic bellyflop, and I've substituted the term "skeletal" with "structure", which I feel is more appropriate:
Reform pruning consists of reducing the tree's structure, suppressing an excessive number of primary branches through a careful selection process, so that those remaining are correctly spaced and inclined with respect to the center axis, in a limited but sufficient number to occupy space and avoid unproductive voids.
In olive trees presenting primary branches with a marked outward inclination, an abundant space results between the structural elements inside the canopy, pushing the tree to an energetic response (epitony) which manifests with a robust emission of dorsal shoots, in an attempt to fill voids and in the shortest possible time restore a natural shape. Where instead one finds reduced inclination of the primaries the tree emits fewer dorsal shoots but exhibits an excessive tendency of the primaries to develop in height and diameter which is difficult to control.
Following the concepts expressed by its creator, Alfredo Roventini, the structure of the main axes of the polyconic vase must be guided towards a single path, suppressing (judiciously) the dichotomous formations or their upper portions, as these attract and retain nutrients in the overlying portions of the tree. The aim is to leave a minimum of dichotomous splitting, and only if said splitting originates from the lower levels of the primary branch to form the basic structure of the tree.
Once the re-forming of the primary branches is complete, the aim of successive prunings becomes the thinning out of the secondary branches, with the purpose of ensuring they have the adequate space to avoid mutual shading, directing them in a decreasing density with the densest fronds at the bottom, aiming for a progressive covering all the way to the top of the primary, to obtain that conical gradient of vegetation which allows better illumination of the parts considered to be of greatest interest for the olive grower.
Having read and re-read those paragraphs and having been schooled, over the past two years, in the basics of polyconic pruning by Vittorio, the above makes sense to me. It's good information. If you watch the brief video of Vittorio explaining a structure of olive trees in my February 2024 blog post dedicated to him, you'll understand the terms "primaries" vs "secondaries" vs "fronds" in the context of a Tuscan olive tree. If you have experience pruning fruit trees other than olive trees you may be shocked at the heavy-handedness the above paragraphs advocate. Olive trees, if healthy, are extraordinarily vigorous and resilient compared with, say, cherry or apricot or other stone fruit trees. This makes them great "learner" trees. You can make (some) ill-judged cuts and not ruin the tree for good. Still, it takes an expert to re-form a highly overgrown tree like the one I photographed in September of 2022. And to show just how deep we sometimes cut, here's a 42-second time-lapse video of a reforming of a large, probably 150-year-old Pendolino situated where our lower grove meets a clutch of olive trees I've come to call the "dirty dozen". This is a gorgeous, robust plant rooted in a fairly steeply-sloped section of grove. When Vittorio went to work, it looked as if it had not been meaningfully pruned in at least 10 years.
45 minutes later Vittorio was finished. What he did, in plainer language than the text I've quoted above, is:
Remove almost all vertical (dorsal) shoots, including six or seven, in the case of a tree this large, each the size of a 7-year-old sapling.
Choose a "line" for the tree's three "primaries" that is as clean as possible and terminating in a final, skyward shoot with some subordinate leaf mass. This results in what tree pruners call "lion-tailing": usually an undesirable result which, in this case, is compensated by the extreme vigor of olive trees, meaning it won't last. The tree will push back hard although mostly with material that will have to be removed in the fall and in successive years to gradually attain the desired result.
Make many reduction cuts which, together with the removal of dorsal shoots, decimated the canopy, with over 95% of the tree's leaf mass removed and on the ground. Pruning this deep and radical is, again, best done in winter, when a tree is dormant. Still, most fruit trees would struggle to survive loss of leaf mass on this scale. Olive trees are unusually resilient.
Leave a select number of well-spaced secondaries which should, in the coming two to four years, generate significant fronds (the waning or hanging branches on which most of any given tree's olives grow) above which further secondaries and fronds will eventually fill in the tree's "polyconic" shape.
For those wanting to connect words to images, the tree pictured in the above time-lapse is, structurally speaking, of the first type described in the above-quoted text: "trees presenting primary branches with a marked outward inclination". This is evident in the final sequence, where the primaries and supporting trunk are pretty much the only thing left.
I'll be clearing the bases (for what's involved in base clearing, see this 2023 post) and thinning out the bushy canopies of about 150 of our 181 lower grove trees in the next 60 days (30 are already done). I won't cut as deep as Vittorio did above, for fear of irreversably damaging them. Most are so bushy though, with so many fine, brittle, starved-for-light-now-dead branches low in their canopies, that there will be plenty for me to do. Some have been slow-assaulted by thorny brambles or ivy over the years, all of which has to be removed first. It's slow work. It's right there in front of you, though, and very plainly needed. In a way, that makes it "easy". Although, as it happens, farming regularly appears on lists of the hardest ways to earn a living. I've started to appreciate why.
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