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Cass Turnbull: Defender of All Things Green by Wenda Reed Photo by Ingrid Pape-Sheldon

Cass Turnbull is chipping the remains of pearly pink nail polish off her short nails.

The self-taught, nationally known pruning expert and landscaper acknowledges that she doesn’t usually wear nail polish. “I was speaking to rich people at a garden club in Palo Alto,” she explains. As founder and director of PlantAmnesty, she spreads the gospel of proper pruning and plant care around the country.

We’re talking in the cavernous conference room of the Magnuson Park headquarters of PlantAmnesty, a nonprofit organization Turnbull started 20 years ago, “to end the senseless torture and mutilation of trees and shrubs.” A few days earlier, she’d applied her expertise to Palo Alto, Calif., citrus trees. The next week, she’d be off to Anchorage, Alaska to tailor the principles to spruce trees and other local flora. Recently, she was invited to address a group of arborists in Italy, and once she made the front page of the Wall Street Journal for her opinions on preserving trees and views.

Turnbull lives and gardens in Greenwood with her husband, John, and two cats, Boo Boo and Buster. A Seattle upbringing, a liberal arts education, a laboring job and a self-actualization course led to her career choice.

She grew up in the Magnolia neighborhood, where she “made friends with empty lots,” spending a lot of time playing and exploring outside. By the time she attended Fairhaven College at Western Washington State University in Bellingham, she was not particularly interested in trees and didn’t do much hiking. Having studied liberal arts, “I didn’t know how to do anything when I left college,” Turnbull says. She became a laborer with the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation, maintaining trails, mowing the grass and plying the Weed Eater at Discovery Park.

From there, she was transferred to maintenance of smaller, passive parks on Queen Anne Hill, and realized that the ground crews “know nothing about plants.” She caught the gardening bug from one of the department’s “gardeners in the park.” In 1986, after 11 years, she left the parks department to start her own landscaping business.

She married her former boss, John Turnbull, who is also a landscaper. She summarizes his business as “Mow, Blow and Go.” “I’m more of a tennis shoe gardener,” she says. “I do most of the physical work myself, although I’m not against power equipment.”

And PlantAmnesty?

With some embarrassment, Turnbull says it began when she attended “one of those self-actualization seminars that were popular in the ’80s.” The first exercise was to write a list of personal complaints about anything; Turnbull says her list was several pages long. The next exercise was to pick one of the complaints and think of a solution.

“I hate bad pruning,” Turnbull wrote. It made her crazy to see trees topped and shrubs sheared into unnatural shapes, resulting in sucker-like branches called water shoots and mutilated plants more prone to disease, rot and wind damage. She put together all she’d learned about pruning into principles she thought everyone could understand. “Before these seminars, my commitment was to get through the next day,” Turnbull says. “Then this dormant desire from my childhood came through.”

The next homework assignment was “Do something about it.” So Turnbull wrote some articles about bad pruning “to send to local rags.” Her husband had uncomplimentary things to say about her writing skills, but some of the smaller publications ran the articles. The Seattle Times chose to interview her instead of running her original piece, and that caught the eye of a book publisher. Drawing on her liberal arts education, Turnbull began preparing a handwritten manuscript. Halfway through, the publisher decided against it, and the book sat on a shelf. (She later published The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation and Maintenance (Betterway Publications, 1991) and in 2004 Sasquatch Press published Cass Turnbull’s Guide to Pruning – What, When, Where & How to Prune for a Beautiful Garden.)

Meanwhile, PlantAmnesty took on a life of its own as Turnbull found like-minded supporters and began disseminating information any way she could. “You’ll have to give a speech,” her husband said dolefully as the organization took off. At one engagement, though she had written out her notes and practiced, she was — pardon the pun — “wooden.” Swallowing terror she had begun speaking, but then laid her cards aside and started to talk to her audience in a more personal way, gardener to gardener.

“I discovered I was good at it,” Turnbull says with evident surprise. “I’ve been doing it for 20 years now, and the adrenaline remains, even though the terror doesn’t.”

And she is good at it. I was among a large group of gardeners attending her recent seminar at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. The talk was about finding solutions to overgrown gardens, but she tossed out references to Greek mythology, haircuts, marriage and “justifiable arboricide.”

If you cut in the middle of a branch, Turnbull told us, it stimulates the growth of lots of water sprouts, producing a “Hydra effect” — a reference to the many-headed monster of Greek mythology that grew back one or more heads every time one was cut off.

One principle of pruning to get an ideal shape is “Wait. Thin. Wait. Thin,” she explained. “It’s kind of like growing your bangs out. The in-between is when it drives you crazy.”

Many of us laughed appreciatively when she likened plant selection and pruning to marriage. “You get what you get when you choose what to plant,” she said, explaining that you can do some shaping, but you can’t change the plant’s essential nature.

Most bad pruning, she said, is due to bad planting — we put too large a plant in too small a space, being in a state of denial about its projected mature or ultimate size. If the plant can’t be moved, it’s best to employ “justifiable arboricide” rather than drastic pruning. “We’re not against killing; we’re against torture,” she said.

She clarified that last statement when we talked later. While she believes selective removal of ugly or overgrown plants can help an individual garden, she’s angry about the wholesale removal of trees in green Seattle.

“Even as an ecologically minded city, Seattle has very little tree preservation,” she says. “We’ve been 18 years trying to get improvements to Seattle’s street trees ordinance, and it keeps being tabled.” Meanwhile, the average diameter of trees in the city is shrinking as mature specimens are replaced by saplings in new developments.

She has nothing kind to say about Seattle’s recommended policy of having two trees planted for every tree that’s cut down, calling it “a reverse Ponzi scheme.” If you put two trees on the same piece of land that held one mature tree, they will eventually grow and one will have to be thinned out, resulting in no net gain, she explains.

“It’s the amount of land left in green space that’s important, she stresses, and that keeps shrinking as commercial developers are allowed to build on 100 percent of their lots and residences are built outward instead of upward. She suggests giving builders tax breaks for building up instead of out and for keeping more land in green space.

“We should think of trees as useful, as a green utility,” she says. “If we think of them that way, and not just as pretty, then we need to pay for it.”

For free information on proper pruning and referrals to landscapers and tree experts, call 206-783-9813 or visit www.plantamnesty.org.

Wenda Reed is a Bothell writer and gardener and a frequent contributor to Seattle Woman. She makes every effort to avoid creating “Hydras” and other pruning horrors.

FESTIVAL OF TREES

Looking for something green to do on Mother’s Day? Come to Magnuson Park for the Festival of Trees, sponsored by PlantAmnesty, Seattle Tilth, the Washington Native Plant Society and others. You’ll be able to pick up free or low-cost trees, see demonstrations on pruning and moving trees, and hear talks by 12 gardening experts, including Ciscoe Morris and Marty Wingate. It’s a family event with kids’ activities, crafts, healthy food offerings, entertainment by the New Old Time Chautauqua, and a chance to ride in a bucket truck or climb a big tree with a rope and saddle. Volunteers will give tours of the “secret gardens” of Magnuson Park, including the children’s, native plant and tranquil therapy gardens, the community pea-patch and the demonstration orchard. There’ll be a ribbon cutting dedication of the bird-friendly garden.
The outdoor green court will feature goats that eat blackberries, red wriggler worms for compost, and city chickens. More than 30 nonprofit groups will offer advice, crafts and eco-gifts. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the park, 7400 Sandpoint Way NE in Seattle. Admission and parking are free. For more information, call 207-783-9813 or visit www.plantamnesty.org.

©2009 Caliope Publishing Company