While out in Japan I was lucky enough to tag along with my cousin’s landscape team during a pine pruning session at Nanshu temple in Sakai. The trees were getting a once-every-three-years cut back, so it was pretty dramatic stuff, involving long reach cherry pickers, lots of ladders, an awful lot of pine pollen, and a friendly monk doing the raking.
Friendly gardener, whose name I should know.
Friendly raker-monk.
Aerial view from top of the cherry picker - a long way up.