Electing for the Care of Trees
My friend, Albizia julibrissin, laden with fragrant blooms on the morning of the election. Not pictured: the maniacally swarming hummingbirds
So begins my series of electional retrospectives, in which I share an election and the situation that brought me to find it, then discuss the relative success (or disaster!) that chart yielded
In April of 2021, I moved across the country and into a new house. This house has been an absolute dream for me. I get a very Venus in Pisces vibe from it—the inside is painted in shades of light blue and green, there are several feral species of mint growing allover the property, and, most of all, we have two mimosa trees growing in the front yard. The umbrella-like mimosa tree is most accurately known as Albizia julibrissin, since it isn't actually a part of the mimosa genus. If you haven't had the delight of meeting one of these amazing Venusian trees, I can’t recommend it enough. their most notable characteristic is their flowers, which look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. From early spring to late autumn (in our bioregion) albizia is bedecked in these flashy, sweet-smelling blooms. So imagine my joy when I realized that we would have two of these goddesses shading our home!
Unfortunately, as is often the case with rentals, once we had properly moved in we started to see some of the cracks in the fantasy—and the trees were one of the biggest. Although mimosa is considered drought-tolerant, even they can't keep up in our high desert bioregion. Worse, it looks like the trees hadn't been watered (or cared for at all, really) by our landlord or previous tenants. These are incredibly tenacious trees, so I knew they could be saved with some care, but the first thing that needed to happen was that they needed many of their dead branches to be pruned. This wasn't my first time pruning a tree, but if you know anything about trees, one of the first rules of pruning is to not prune at the beginning of spring because it puts a lot of stress on the tree. In our area, we were in the midst of an early heatwave which was also a stressor for the tree. Nonetheless, these branches needed to come down to give these trees a fighting chance in the coming monsoon season.
Even though I had some basic experience with tree-trimming, clearly this situation was not ideal! Here we have something that is absolutely necessary to do but contains many potential pitfalls without luck on my side. This is the exact kind of situation that could benefit from working with electional astrology. I sifted through the texts I have on electional astrology but wasn't able to find a formula for electing this specific situation, so I decided to go with a formula that has served me well for many purposes: William Ramesey's rules for haircutting and nail trimming elections, which I wrote about recently.
Scanning through the ephemeris, I found a date that seemed like it could be a good fit, then set myself to tweak the chart.
Here is the chart I chose for a sunrise on a Friday morning
An astrological chart for Friday, 18 Jun 2021 at 06:35 AM in Albuquerque, NM, USA. The chart uses Placidus houses.
My approach was to more-or-less follow William Ramesey's guidelines for haircuts and manicures, while considering some of the principles of astrological gardening as well. Surprisingly (or, maybe, unsurprisingly) these rules overlap in many places. Let's review what Ramesey suggests for elections to help hair grow:
Moon and/or ascendant in a fertile sign (that means a water sign or perhaps Taurus)
Moon waxing and/or increasing in speed
Protect the Moon and the ascendant from malefics
I chose this day for a few reasons. In gardening elections, the Libra Moon is used to help flowers bloom¹ bigger and more frequently, which was perfect for this these flowering trees. Seeing that an extra watery Venus in Cancer would rise in her hour on her day, Friday, under a Libra Moon, I couldn't think of a better chart to give these trees some care.
I also like that I was able to get the Moon waxing and moving fast. Her applying aspect is a sextile to Mars, which might not be the best for a haircut, but felt like a good move for this chart. Mars rules sharp things, which absolutely included my pruning saw. Considering that I was the one who would be doing the pruning, I hoped that having the Moon encouraged by Mars would give me precision and skill. I was also happy to get her configured to the Lot of Fortune in the 4th house, hopefully creating those beautiful Libran flowers by to strengthening the trees' root systems.
My dream was to get Jupiter to trine the ascendant, wouldn't that have been beautiful? It just wasn't happening that morning for me though! 6:35 was the earliest I ended up being able to get my ass hauled up into a tree that morning. At the very least, I was pleased to find a time when the ascendant was averse malefics, meaning that neither Mars or Saturn were aspecting the ascendant by a major aspect.²
All in all, I'm quite pleased with my election from a technical standpoint—but how did it actually go?
It's been about a year and a half since I pruned the trees and it seems to have gone quite well. As I mentioned above, you never want to prune flowering trees while they're blooming. Often the shock can cause the tree to drop their flowers and not bloom again until the next season. That definitely didn't happen! If anything, I felt like the trees were even more abundant than before once I had freed them from some of their dead weight! The trees overwintered without any more of their branches dying and when spring came the following year they were absolutely laden with blooms, more fragrant than ever before.
The only negative? I was assaulted by hummingbirds! I am new to this bioregion, and the hummingbirds were not something I was expecting at all. The Middle Rio Grande Basin is known for having a large and diverse hummingbird population³ and mimosa is one of hummingbirds favorite trees. As soon as I started sawing, these audacious and aggressively territorial male hummingbirds went after me, pulling at my hair and trying to peck out my eyes! I had to step inside to wrap my hair in a scarf and protect my eyes with sunglasses (and luckily they relented before too long). Although I was able to prune with skill, I might try to get the Moon aspecting a benefic next time I do a springtime gardening election around here.
Notes
¹ This rule is even in the farmer's almanac!
² The major aspects are the opposition (180º), the trine (120º), the square (90º), the sextile (60º). The conjunction (0º) is it’s own type of angular relationship, not technically an aspect, but for these purposes it would be included too, at least colloquially.
³ The first wave of highly territorial male hummingbirds come through this bioregion in early spring. The Rio Grande Valley is an important stop for these birds, apparently in my mimosas in particular!