In his presentation at the San Francisco County Fair Building its mid-century modern renovation now finefinished with wood sound baffles, Kipping showed virtuoso examples from Europe, Japan and the United States of the pruning the control of woody plants.

From espalier, the growing of fruit trees in a single plane for maximal production, to pollarding, the pruning of stems back to the same limbstump every year, to Le Notre’s hedge carpets, to clipping unruly trees into ‘niwaki” cloud form for aesthetic pleasure, Kipping’s slides transported the audience through the most humanmanipulated forms of plant culture this side of UC Davis.

Unlike those square tomatoes beside Interstate 80, however, the plants in Kipping’s slides bespoke results many gardeners could try to achieve themselves with a ladder and clippers, shears and perhaps stakes, ropes and weights. In Japan, Kipping has seen perhaps the most extraordinary lengths to which people will go to create beautiful trees. Bonsai are plants kept in pots, a Chinese style elaborated in Japan and understood in America as miniature trees, although vines, shrubs, bamboos, ferns, palms and other types of plants are often grown as bonsai. Kipping showed trees in the garden manipulated over centuries to maintain cascading limbs or proportions otherwise seen only in nature, and only at a distance.

Picturesque geometry might be the term for images Kipping shared from the European pruning traditions. Often committed in the name of productivity, espalier and other forms arose once all the deer was venison. Little need to keep things pruned when they're nibbled every night.

The slides from Europe included pear trees espaliered and pleached stems grafted together to resemble postcard racks and children’s Christmas trees; and Carpinus squaredoff into trunked hedges. From California, Kipping showed neighboring Platanus pleached into a single canopy, an Olea europea carefully shaped over four years from sprawl to niwaki grace, and a propertyline Podocarpus given two different haircuts, each according to the homeowner’s preference.

From Hawaii Kipping presented the example of how the right plant in the right place allows methods from home to work. After years of trying to perform feats on sickly temperate conifers from home, a Kauai gardener tried Casuarina equisetifolia, the vigorous tropical Ironwood or Australian Pine tree, and created a mesmerizing living sculpture.

From nature, the audience saw examples of how wind, snowpack and sunshine manipulate the form of alpine conifers, creating foothigh, matlike krummolz and driftwoodlike pines with thin strips of live bark supporting sprigs of green.

Perhaps most valuable for the gardeners in the audience was Kipping’s detailed discussion of how to prune. He explained how mistakes can damn a tree to instability and breakage and how selecting a cut at the right spot above the bark collar at a branch can maintain the health of a tree. For more information on trees, interested readers may log on to www.treeshapers.com, Kipping’s own Web site.

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