Gardeners shape a greener future

WALKING in the Shanghai Botanic Garden and appreciating the beautiful surroundings, have you ever noticed the gardeners and felt curious about their work?

Shanghai Daily spent a day with gardener Li Hui, 45, last week.

It was cold and cloudy, and the garden doesn't have many visitors in winter. But Li and his co-workers are hard at work every day.

Li arrives at 8am, half an hour early, for a meeting with his co-workers about how they will organize the daily work.

After the meeting, Li gathered some tools together, including pruning shears and a saw. His first job was to prune some hibiscus trees.

He took out the pruning shears and started to cut away some of the bare branches.

"Is it necessary to prune the bare trees?" we asked. Li smiled, and said yes. "Pruning the bare trees in winter makes for a better shape and enables them to grow better next year," Li said. "The rule is to remove crossing branches, dead, diseased or injured wood and any branches growing toward the center of the plant."

Li spent the morning pruning several hibiscus trees and stopped for lunch at 12:30pm.

During his half-hour break, he told Shanghai Daily about his working experience.

He started as a gardener in the botanic garden in 1982 and three years later was elected leader of one of the garden's three teams.

"Most workers now recruited are graduates from the related school, but I wasn't." But Li taught himself and has attained the position of senior gardener. He said it was hard to recruit young workers now, although the working conditions had greatly improved.

"In the past we removed grass by hand but now we have machine to do it and we have a lifter to send us up extremely tall trees."

Asked whether the work was boring, Li said no. "If you like your job, you will never feel bored."

That afternoon, Li did some pruning work on ornamental plants in the shape of two lions. To shape a plant takes several years, and that requires much patience on the part of the gardener.

In the first year, the plants are pruned roughly into shape and in the following years pruned more and more carefully.

Li said he hated visitors who damaged the plants and one of his tasks every day before leaving was to walk around the area his team was responsible for to check on any damage or work that would need to be done the next day.

"We are responsible for 22 hectares of plants in the garden. Walking around the area takes about 20 minutes."

At its busiest, during the festivals, the botanic garden gets up to 30,000 visitors a day. The most common damage is caused by visitors walking on the grass or picking the flowers.

It looked like rain as the day wore on. "Rain and even snow won't stop our work," Li said. "When you are 100 percent concentrated on the work, you don't feel the cold."