Senior horticulturalist and arborist Owen Bolitho doesn't rely on textbooks to shape trees in the National Arboretum Canberra.
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But he does rely on his $3000 secateurs, powered by a battery pack on his back.
They are powerful, sensitive and fairly safe when used in conjunction with a glove on his left hand.
A circuit runs through the glove and will short circuit if the blades come too close, saving him from losing a finger. After pruning two forests, the secateurs' automatic register counted 10,000 cuts.
In the young forest's fast-changing western fringe Mr Bolitho sees every branch as an opportunity for the future. More than 44,000 deciduous and evergreen trees need either pruning or maintaining, and he believes each early cut is critical.
"I need the trees to tell me what to prune," says Mr Bolitho. "A good forest needs to be mysterious, to invite people in, they can't see through it."
"I hope to get lost in one of these forests one day," he says, before recalling when he was a boy growing up in Weston, riding his bike into the Himalayan cedar forest, which survived the 2003 firestorm. He found the shadows, tangle of needles and spider webs spooky.
When people tell him the arboretum in 20 years' time will be amazing, the 38-year-old responds: "It's amazing now."
In pruning young Persian ironwood trees, which have extremely tough hardwood, he aims to eliminate the effects of searing summer westerly winds and icy cold winter winds which have tilted the trees. He looks for conflict within a tree's crown, and will remove branches that may cause a problem later on, duplicate branches, or ones crossed over or rubbing together.
"This forest is quite unique because the ironwood has the ability to weld its trunks together, so it's a real consideration – you could form something really interesting and unique down the track. If you make a couple of cuts you can lose that opportunity," he says.
This formative pruning develops the structure of tree. Subsequent pruning won't be so intensive, it will be more like picking off shoots in the wrong spots, tidying them up and removing deadwood. Early intervention can be the making of a tree. A low branch which should be lopped according to the textbook might escape Mr Bolitho's cut because he sees a boy one day walking up that branch, or a swing hanging from it.
A new path snakes through the Persian ironwood forest, so many of the trees will one day form an arbour or tunnel over the path. "We encourage trees to do interesting things."
