Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (25 page)

“Is it one of the guys whose cards I gave you?” I looked up from the weeding I was doing.

“No,” she said. “A man came to the door and said he used to prune the trees here.”

“How do you know he's any good?” The recommendations I had given her were reputable—people experienced with older trees, even. This stranger I knew nothing about.

“This guy knows the trees already,” my mother said. “He's worked on them before. Anyway, he's coming on Wednesday. It's all planned.”

My mother has a way of shutting down a conversation, of asserting that she's in charge. I never knew how much to push back. This time I didn't. They were her trees; she would be paying for the pruning. She didn't want to hear what I had to say.

It was a week before I found myself in the garden again. My mother met me at the gate, aggrieved. “I did a terrible thing,” she said.

“What is it?” I braced for bad news.

“The trees, the pruner—he did a hatchet job.”

“Let me see,” I said, trying not to overreact. How bad could it be?

I didn't know much about pruning myself. I had taken an afternoon class, just the basics. But even I knew you shouldn't hack back branches at the tips. Even I knew pruning too much will cause the tree to go into panic mode and produce what are called “water sprouts.” These numerous thin branches grow straight upright; they do not bear fruit; they are weak, an entry point for disease. Pruning too hard is a good way to ruin the shape and productivity of a fruit tree.

That is what had happened to our trees. Instead of picking and choosing the strongest branches, instead of thinning them, the pruner had given the trees an allover haircut. He had cut too much. It was exactly the wrong thing to have done. Looking at the sawed-off branches, the open, raw cuts, I felt sick to my stomach.

More than that, I felt
angry
. Someone had come into the garden under the guise of helping and instead had harmed these trees. They were under our stewardship, and they had been savaged.

The strength of my emotion surprised me. I was angry at this man for what he had done, for misrepresenting his skill and knowledge, and angry at my mother for trusting him and not listening to me. And I was angry at myself for not pushing back, for letting her shut me down.

“Why didn't you listen to me? Why didn't you call the guys I gave you?”

“I know,
I know
!”

I took no comfort in being right. Being right wouldn't bring back the trees. Every rough cut I looked at made me want to vomit. These trees had been brutalized.

“They might die,” my mom said quietly, already in mourning; the woman had no faith.

I looked at the trees—how many years had they grown here? Twenty, maybe thirty? If we had to replace them, how many years would it take to make up what had been lost?
Decades
.

I sighed. Nothing could be done.

“If the trees die, you sell the house.” I didn't have it in me to start an orchard over from scratch.

My mother nodded. “Yes,” she said soberly. “I think you're right.”

The summer that followed, the large pear tree—the biggest tree in the garden—was covered with water sprouts growing straight up. There were few flowers that spring, and at the end of the summer, this tree that had given us baskets and baskets of fruit the summer before had exactly two pears on it.

But it did not die.

As if in penance, my mother started taking pruning classes. She came home using terms like “leader cut” and “apical dominance.” It occurred to me that I should be the one taking these pruning classes. She was accumulating knowledge I would eventually need. The trees would live far longer than she would.

“Before you die, you're going to have to teach me everything you're learning about tree pruning,” I told her one day.

“Sure,” she said amiably. The idea of death had never bothered my mother. If anything, she was surprised to have lived this long. I had recently asked if there were things she wanted to do before she died, but she didn't seem worried.

“Mostly what I want is to live long enough for Graham to remember me,” she told me. “That's the really important thing.”

In the meantime, there were fruit trees to look after. Though her own knowledge was growing, my mother hired an expert to help bring the butchered trees back to life. Ingela Wanerstrand was also a steward at Piper's Orchard. In the other part of her life, she worked as a designer, teacher, and garden coach specializing in edible landscapes. She had more than twenty years of experience working with fruit trees.

Ingela began coming to the garden twice a year, training the trees, teaching us how to care for them. She was patient and good-natured, and she explained everything she did. Most of the water sprouts were gradually removed, except a few that were well placed and could be converted to productive branches.

She taught us how to look at the shape of the branches to select for the form we wanted. She showed how to weight down a young, thin branch to coax it to grow in a certain direction. And she showed us how some of the baby trees we had planted were not good specimens—too long in the trunk, with awkward branching patterns. Ordering trees from a catalog means you have no say in structure or form.

It soon became clear that Ingela was training us as much as she was training the trees. At the end of a visit, the orchard was littered with leaves and pruned-off branches to be collected and disposed of, but the trees looked healthier; they looked stronger.

It took two years for the trees to outgrow the damage that had been done to them. Some of them never quite recovered. There were two others that had never borne fruit. Every year my mother talked to them, admonished them: “If you don't get it together, you're getting yanked out.” The trees seemed to ignore her nagging just as much as my brother and I had when we were teenagers. As another summer approached and there was still no fruit, we talked about replacing them, putting in apricots, or a yellow plum, or maybe an almond. An orchard, it turns out, is a work in progress.

That spring the trees were again covered in tiny white and pink blossoms, and as summer rolled onward, the flowers grew into fruit. The small peach tree we had planted had its first solid harvest—more than a dozen tiny fuzzy fruits where the previous summer had seen only three. Peaches are not common backyard trees in Seattle, but this variety had been bred to ripen with less heat and resist the cracking that rains often cause on peaches in western Washington.

The fruit was on the small side, but so plentiful I had to prop up the still-thin branches so they wouldn't break under the weight of the harvest. I should have pinched off some of the fruits early in the season—thinned them to encourage growth in the ones that would remain—but I didn't have the heart. That summer Abby, Cate, Graham, and I ate small peaches colored like a sunset and grinned at each other as the juice dripped down our chins.

The big pear tree was again loaded. Again there were basket hauls that topped out at forty pounds. I chopped up pears for the freezer, to be used in baked goods and smoothies, and made pear sauce, and gave pears to friends. The rest I lined up in the refrigerator. The pears took up three shelves—row after row of upright fruit. Every time I opened the door, it looked like an army marching in formation.

Then the apples started—first one variety and then another. We weren't sure of all the names, but we seemed to have Liberty and McIntosh. Their skins were red, and when I simmered them down into applesauce, the mixture turned a rosy pink. We stocked the freezer with it
—our applesauce
—and it tasted better than any I'd had before. This applesauce had personality, a fresh and tangy flavor.

I loved marking the jars:
ORCHARD HOUSE APPLE SAUCE, ORCHARD HOUSE PEAR JAM
. I already knew the pleasure of producing food, of putting up something for the cold months ahead, but when it was made with ingredients we had grown, that feeling was magnified. We never set out to be self-sufficient; this
was no experiment in living off the land, but I was surprised by the sense of accomplishment. When I sent jars of apple and pear sauce home with my brother and sister-in-law, to feed my nieces and toddler nephew, I nearly glowed with pride.

The best days were the ones when the kids came over and we all ended up in the kitchen. I found an old-fashioned apple peeler at a thrift store and clamped it to one of the tall kitchen stools, just the right height for them. They took turns turning the crank, watching as the apple peels ribboned out the side and piled up into a big mound. When the apple was done, they slid the fruit off its core and displayed it for all to see: perfectly peeled and sliced. It felt like magic.

I smiled at my mother and she smiled back, both of us enjoying the children's delight.

We pulled those slices apart, and my mother arranged them on the dehydrator trays, sliding them into the black, boxy machine. When turned on it made a low humming noise, and the house slowly filled with the sunny, sweet fragrance of fruit. It took nearly a day for each batch to dry. The sound and the scent of apples and pears drifted through the house for weeks.

I looked around—at the kids happily cranking the fruit, at my mother laying out the slices to be dried—and I felt as if we were in one of my books from childhood: Mary and Laura putting up food with Ma in
Little House on the Prairie
, Marilla making jams and cordials with Anne at Green Gables. It felt like we had gone back in time.

Here we were, engaged in the ancient dance of preserving the harvest. For generations this was what had kept families and communities together—pitching in to secure the basics of life. You could not raise a barn or bring in the harvest on your own. You needed people to help you. In turn you helped them—and when the winds howled and the snows came, if things went according to plan, you would all be warm and well fed. I didn't know if my brother and sister-in-law would ever join us in the
garden, in the kitchen, but I hoped someday they would. That we would all work together.

In a life increasingly filled with urgency and technology, it felt good to do something elemental. In a season when food was plentiful, we were preparing some of it to be saved, to last through the winter, until the strawberries bloomed and the raspberries colored up and we had fruit again. Throughout history this had been the role of family—to work together to gather your stores, save your seeds, and hope your harvest lasted through the winter and gave you a chance at doing it all again. These days our quest is to be happy, to be successful, but for years the goal had been just to survive.

This wasn't our one chance at survival—our apple and pear chips would serve as snacks for the kids all winter long, not the only supplies in our storehouse. But still, it felt good to be providing for ourselves and teaching this new generation. They might need it someday.

I remembered a day, a few years prior, when my mother was still living in California and the girls and I were eating winter citrus. On that day I had asked Abby if she knew where oranges came from. I wanted to tell her about orange groves in California, where her grandma lived, how they sloped down to the sea, how they smelled like heaven in full bloom. She was only four at the time, but when I asked the question, she looked at me like I was an idiot.
Where do oranges come from?

“They come from Trader Joe's,” she said. Obviously.

Now, just a few years later, here we all were. The girls would never question where apples and pears came from. They had played under blooming boughs in the springtime, wandered through the tall grasses of summer, and watched fruit grow round and ripe. These apples didn't come from the grocery store—they were
our
apples.

We had grown them ourselves.

I
DON
'
T REMEMBER HOW
I got the idea, but after a few years in the garden, I decided to grow our annual Thanksgiving dinner. We had already grown so many things—lettuce, berries, tomatoes, radishes, kale, peaches, zucchini. Never mind that none of these items were
on
a traditional Thanksgiving menu; once I had the idea in my head, I couldn't shake it. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. I wanted to celebrate with a harvest of our own.

The fact that most of my family is vegetarian made it easier—my brother and I eat meat, but no one else does. We hadn't served turkey on Thanksgiving for many years. There would be no need for a poultry harvest at Orchard House.

There would be pumpkins, however, and corn and cranberries. We'd have brussels sprouts and green beans, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple pie. All those things were possible. I just had to make it happen.

I was probably the only person planning my Thanksgiving menu in March, as gray drizzle fell from Seattle skies and the tulips had not yet bloomed, but this would not be a quick process. One does not decide in July or August to grow a Thanksgiving meal. It seemed odd to be thinking about apples and pumpkins when the garden was still asleep, but I needed to start in early spring, when everything was still just hope and possibility.

That spring at the plant sale, I stocked up, purchasing a container of pumpkin starts that held three small seedlings. There were four tiny brussels sprouts as well, surely enough for us all, and I ordered five cranberry vines from a fruit-tree catalog. I planted them all in the earth on a late-spring day when the sunshine had just begun to have some warmth to it, when it felt like summer might be around the corner, when the season stretched ahead full of potential.

The first surprise came with the cranberries. Five vines had sounded like a lot, but they arrived thin and wimpy looking. I knew plants sometimes start small and then take off, like teen boys who sprout up seemingly overnight. I tried not to be like my mother and assume the worst. I tried to have faith.

Despite my positive outlook, the cranberries did not fill in. As spring turned to summer, they flowered—small blossoms that would eventually turn to fruit. But here was another problem. If you counted them all up, between the five vines, there were exactly seven flowers.

If everything went well, if they didn't fall prey to bird, bug, snail, or slug—or spontaneously fall off the vine for no apparent reason (this happened with alarming regularity), we would have exactly seven berries.

Seven berries were not enough to make cranberry sauce; seven berries were not enough to garnish cocktails. I wasn't sure there was
anything
you could do with only seven cranberries. Place-card holders on the Thanksgiving table?

I told myself it would be okay. The kids didn't even like cranberry sauce.

Next came the brussels sprouts.

Growing up on the California coast, I had been used to brussels sprouts—thick, stubby stalks festooned with tiny, cabbagelike heads. I thought they were funny looking. When seen as a pile of baby cabbages in the market, they look adorable; on the stem they look like a surrealist vegetable mash-up.

That year the brussels sprouts took their revenge on me and refused to grow, remaining small and stunted even late into the summer. I didn't know then that brussels sprouts often do not thrive in the Northwest. It's hard to grow them to a decent size.

Even the pumpkins gave me a run for my money. There had been three seedlings in the pack I bought: three tender shoots, their secondary leaves already unfurling, prickly and green.

I planted them in the side garden, where the soil was excellent and they would get plenty of light. As soon as I did, one of them withered and died. I had watered them equally, and the other two were doing fine. I stood there looking blankly at the now-brown shoot.

Our statistical chance of pumpkin pie had just dropped by 33 percent. Who knew if there would be a Thanksgiving dinner at all?

My menu might have been in jeopardy, but the event itself was never in question. Of all the holidays, only Thanksgiving belonged to my family. Other secular holidays—the Fourth of July, Memorial or Labor Day—we never spent together.

The religious holidays were more complicated. My mother's family had not been observant, but in raising children, she wanted us to know the culture we had come from. So we lit Hanukkah candles, and if we were lucky, there were latkes, though my mother was never a fan of potatoes or deep frying.
But there was never any community, no gathering. The three of us sat at the kitchen table in that house in the country and spun the dreidel all alone.

What community we had came with Christmas, when the entire neighborhood gathered at the home of the family with the largest house—a huge, barnlike structure the husband had designed and built himself. They were of German descent, and their Christmas tree, which soared up to the second story, was decorated with real candles that glowed through the evening and seemed to touch everything with magic. At some point in the evening, Santa Claus would appear and pass out a gift to each and every child. One year I found a small pink diary hidden in my mother's closet, and when Santa gave it to me at the Christmas party, I realized the parents were supplying the gifts.

My mother wasn't fond of Christmas, but she wasn't sure how to avoid it. There were craft fairs in town, festive gatherings among friends and at school, decorations in stores and on houses. It's hard not to notice Christmas if you live in mainstream America.

Every year my mother swore she wouldn't fall into the Christmas trap. She didn't like the holiday, didn't believe in the commercialism, the excess. The truth is she also couldn't afford it.

Every year she held out until Christmas Eve. That was the day she could no longer be strong, the day she couldn't bear to disappoint her children.

“I always ended up buying some stupid plastic crap—just to have something to give you,” she told me many years later. “You know those glitter stars? I bought them at the drugstore on Christmas Eve. I had to get
something;
they were the only things I could find.”

The stars were made of clear plastic filled with water and silver glitter. When you shook them or turned them upside down, the glitter scattered to the bottom as in a snow globe,
shining and sparkling. My brother and I had loved them and spent hours watching the glitter sink slowly through the water, gleaming as it fell. The stars now sit on a shelf in the bedroom my mother has for her grandchildren. They sparkle still.

It would be years before I heard the other reason my mother didn't like Christmas.

When my mother was a little girl of six or seven, the other children in her school threw rocks at her—they stoned her. They shouted and yelled at her because her family was Jewish; they told her she killed Jesus.

“What did you
do
?” I was horrified. I had been raised in a time and place that embraced diversity. I couldn't imagine such a thing.

“I was young, but I was smart,” my mother said. “And I was good at history. I shouted back, ‘I didn't kill him—the Romans did!' And I ran away as fast as I could.”

Christmas is a complicated thing, even when you don't celebrate it.

As adults we did not spend the holiday together. My brother spent it with his children and in-laws, a flurry of wrapping paper, and a twelve-foot-tall Christmas tree. When I lived in San Francisco, I relied on the generosity of friends, glad to have it but sad I did not have a family to go to, a place where my presence was expected. The anxiety over where I was going to be for Christmas started up every fall.

My mother vanished for the holiday. She went to her cabin in Canada and retreated from the world. She read books; she slept; she ventured out only if friends invited her over. She said she was happy being alone.

I joked that she was fleeing—the country, the commercialism, the dominant religion she did not share, the excess and waste, the cheap plastic crap. It was everything she did not believe in.

She ran away, as fast as she could
.

After initial disappointment with the pumpkin seedlings, the two that survived grew strong. Floppy lobed leaves sprouted from thick and prickly stems; thin tendrils reached out to grasp whatever they could to support the vines' growth. They reminded me of the decorations on Cinderella's carriage.

One of the stems shot out of the side garden and into the lilac bush nearby. It grew into the branches, threading its way through the leaves and woody stems until it was impossible to untangle the two. Perhaps we would have orange pumpkins hanging from our lilac that year.

Eventually, after much hope on my part, flowers emerged—tissue-paper thin and colored like the sun. They unfurled slowly, these big showy flowers. I eagerly checked their stems.

All squash, including pumpkins, produce male and female flowers—you can see the gender at the base. The male flowers have long, slender stems, while female flowers feature a round, slightly swollen bump. It is this bump that, once pollinated, grows larger and larger and eventually becomes a pumpkin or other squash. The first few flowers the vine produces will always be male. It is only when there is enough pollen available that a female flower is produced.

I hadn't known the excitement of that first female flower—the swollen stem that holds the potential for fruit. It's not the same strange wonder as when a friend becomes pregnant and you realize she holds future life inside her, but it's not unrelated either.

Unlike with female pregnancy, that swollen stem is just potential, not the event itself. To be expecting in the squash world requires a visit from a bee that has already visited male flowers and picked up pollen on the tiny hairs of its body. In the squash world, conception requires a middleman.

Despite my earnest attempts to be hopeful—at least more
hopeful than my mother—I was worried. It seemed such a gamble. What if a bee never came? (They had been dying off lately.) What if it was her first stop of the day, and she hadn't picked up enough pollen? What if she had the wrong pollen? Female flowers were open for only a day or two. There wasn't a lot of time to get this right.

In human fertility terms, it was akin to leaving a vial of sperm on the side of the road and hoping that someone would come along and be nice enough to deliver it to the doctor's office down the street within the required time period. Nature is exquisitely attuned and mind-blowingly intricate, but this seemed a long shot. What if it didn't work?

When the first female squash flower withered on the vine and the round, swollen bit turned soft and yellow and dropped off, I grieved. I decided I needed to do something about this. Perhaps I wasn't so hopeful after all.

One mid-August day I stood in the side garden and hand-pollinated my pumpkins. I'd heard you could do this, but I had never tried before. I picked a male flower and carefully peeled back the thin, damp petals. What I saw when I got down to the business surprised me.

The male pumpkin blossom had a center protrusion that tapered slightly and then swelled round and long, covered with golden pollen. It took me aback. I knew it was the flower part called the stamen, but it definitely looked phallic.

When I carried it over to the open female flower, things got stranger still. In the center was a circle of yellow bits—the stigma—that spouted up like a fountain and curled backward in a manner reminiscent of the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Then, in the center, was something that looked surprisingly like a hole.

What was I to do? I blushed. I looked around awkwardly to make sure no one could see me. Then I stuck the long, thick golden male stamen deep into the hole.

But first I rubbed it quickly around the outside of the opening. Because I thought the poor female flower deserved a decent chance of enjoying herself.

Growing up we usually spent Thanksgiving at home. Occasionally other people joined us, but rarely the same person twice. People came in and out of our lives like flowing water in the early years. Sometimes they were from my mother's past, or her current colleagues. A few times when I was very young, we went to someone else's home for the holiday, but that was rare.

What I remember is this: a day spent together, hanging out, cooking. There was usually a walk in late-November sunshine that was still golden even though the leaves had already turned. In the early days, we were out in the country, in the ramshackle house with the old apple trees. In my teenage years, we spent Thanksgiving in my mother's kitchen, with its big windows and the leafy yard all around, a huge maple tree flaming scarlet.

My first year of college, we had our meal there, with a teaching colleague of my mother's who had become a friend. Then we all drove out to the beach to see the small cabin my mother and this friend had begun to rent as a weekend getaway.

When we walked out on the deck and saw the view—the wide-open panorama of the Pacific stretching to the horizon—my brother said what everyone had been thinking: “Why didn't we have Thanksgiving
here
?” After that, and for all the rest of our California years, we did. I thought we always would.

Thanksgiving was important to me. It was a day based on gathering, coming together, sitting down around a large table. It celebrated food and harvest and excluded no one. If someone had made a national holiday just for me, it would look a lot like Thanksgiving.

As with so many things, I wished we had Thanksgiving traditions—a
family stuffing, an apple pie recipe passed down from a grandmother. I envied those whose repeated rituals had worn grooves deep and wide; such things provide guides in life, a way to navigate, assurance that you are on the proper path. In my family, it felt like we were careening all over the place.