Snipped Off

For our science lesson today let’s visit the King’s orchard. Pull on your mittens, for it is frosty and cold outside. It is a gray day and all the tree branches are smooth and bare, but there is the gardener up on a ladder! Nothing is growing, so what could he be doing?

Come closer and watch. Snip, snip, snip. Long, thin branches are falling to the ground all around the tree. Snip, snip! “Why are you cutting them off?” you ask.

“If you want good apples, then the trees have to be pruned in the winter,” he says. “I am pruning off all the weak and crooked branches so that the tree will be strong. See, here.” We watch as he snips along a branch. It looks like it is getting a haircut!

“Does it hurt the tree?” you want to know.

“Not too much. It helps the tree bear apples and not a lot of leaves. If I left it to itself, it would grow bushy and only have small fruits,” he tells us. “When it gets cut short, it spends time growing the right way. Just like children that need to be trained to do what is right,” he says with a smile.

You pick up a fallen twig and look at all the little buds just starting to form. “Now these can’t grow into flowers, can they?” you ask.

“No, because those are only leaf buds,” he says. “Twigs think they need lots of leaves, but they don’t. Just like you think you know best, but mother doesn’t let you have your own way. If your parents love you, they will correct you and stop you from doing things that are wrong.”

“Like you snip off twigs?” You look at stubby tree branches. “It doesn’t seem very much like it helps.”

“Maybe not now,” the gardener says, taking down his ladder. “But if this tree responds like it should, these bare branches will be covered with pink blossoms in the spring. And if you trust and obey when you are corrected, I think we will see a happy child growing in the right way.”