Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow (5 page)

After a day spent staring at a computer, I loved going to the garden. It was a relief to push my chair back and head outside. I kept tools and garden gloves in the car, and no matter how challenging the day, my spirits perked up as I walked down the Picardo path. On hot days it was cooler there, with the scent of warm earth and herbs, a low, persistent hum from the bees kept in a hive. I often stayed until sundown, hoeing, weeding, soaking up the place. Time moves slower in a garden, the hours unfold gently, generously. There is a deep quiet that can only be described as peace. The soft breeze, the sun on my back, the colors of cascading flowers, the feel of warm soil, the satisfaction of tools in my hands and work made visible. Most days I didn't want to leave.

I thought a large garden like Picardo would provide plenty of people to get to know, but it didn't work that way. There were almost always other gardeners there when I was, but they were often on the other side of the field. Because there were so many of us, there was no expectation for you to know everyone. I always waved, but conversation rarely ensued.

I saw the man who had the plot next to me only once that summer. When he noticed I was growing Japanese vegetables, he mentioned he had been there on leave from Vietnam. The neighbor on the other side I also saw only once. When I asked about the straw covering her garden, she explained it kept in moisture and suppressed weeds. We agreed to water each other's plots if the plants looked particularly droopy. I never saw her again.

The woman across the path was there more frequently. When she heard this was my first proper garden, she complimented the spacing of my plants. “So many people get that wrong in the beginning,” she said. Her name was Heather. She lived in the neighborhood and came to the garden often.

“Lucky for you to live so close.” It was a fifteen-minute drive from my house to Picardo, longer if traffic was bad.

“I had the garden plot before I had the house,” she explained. “But I was coming here all the time, and eventually I saw a For Rent sign. That's how it works—everything starts revolving around your garden.”

Months later I would wonder if I should have taken this as a warning.

I was happy to meet someone friendly—happier when she offered to water my plot while I took my nieces to Canada that August. I had planned to ask my brother, but when Heather offered I was glad not to. I couldn't imagine him in the garden, coming straight from work in his pin-striped shirt, dragging the hose down a dusty path in Italian leather shoes.

I saw Heather only one time after that, the day I got back from Canada. I brought her a jar of peach jam as a thank-you. She reciprocated with a bouquet of her dahlias, picking each flower with care, bundling them together before handing them to me with quiet pride.

“You just can't buy flowers like this,” she said.

I sank my face into their soft petals, all the colors of a sunset there in my hands.
No, you cannot buy this
.

I had come back to a late-summer garden. Suddenly everything was ripe, and I took home handfuls of cherry tomatoes and bunches of basil every time I visited. The volunteer plant yielded potatoes: yellow, red, and an unexpected purple-fleshed variety. There were broccoli and beans and plenty of chard, and I was surprised to discover I had grown enough food to make a meal: an entire dinner from my own little garden plot.

On an otherwise ordinary Thursday evening, I sautéed the new potatoes with fresh herbs. I cooked broccoli and tossed
cherry tomatoes with basil for a salad. Only the olive oil and salt were not raised by my own hand.

Sitting down to this meal felt momentous. It felt like something to be proud of. I had brought it into being, with the help of the sunlight and water and soil. All this was my own doing. This meal would not have existed without me.

When my mother came through Seattle at the end of the summer, I was eager to show her my garden, the first proper one I'd ever had. She was in town for only a day or so, spending most of her time with the kids, but that afternoon I drove her to Picardo, parking on the street and leading her down the worn dirt path and along the checkerboard of plants and flowers that made up the community plots. I thought she would like the garden. Sunflowers were rising high; scarlet runner beans had overcome their trellises and were reaching up to the sky; bees and butterflies flitted everywhere. It was a glorious afternoon in the garden as I led her to my plot and stood there with quiet pride.

My mother looked at my garden, at the bean-covered tepees in the back, at the staggered chard plants and purslane and strawberries. The garden was shaped like a giant
S
, with two half paths that didn't go all the way through. It maximized the planting area and the edge that permaculturalists love. There was nary a grid or straight line in sight.

My mother looked at my plot, beautiful in its glorious profusion, and was silent a moment.

“Well,” she said at last, “I guess you like messy gardens.”

As August rolled into September, October's deadline loomed: the end of the season, the date by which everything needed to be dismantled in the garden.

My deadline was even earlier. I had to be in California by mid-September. My garden needed to be taken down before I
left. Everything needed to be gone, the earth returned to its naked state.

Down came the bamboo tepees, the beans stripped from them still flowering. The strawberries were transplanted to my house. The root crops were all dug up—potatoes I hadn't even planted and the tiny carrots I had. My nieces had helped plant the carrots, and I wanted them to have the fun of pulling them up, but their schedule was too busy for my sister-in-law to bring them by the garden. I yanked the carrots out myself and stuck them in a bag I hoped my brother would give the girls: Sad little thin carrots the length of my thumb, they needed the end of summer to size up.

The most painful was the chard. I had bought a pack of starts early in the season—forty small sprouts with roots tinged pink and yellow. They all thrived, producing ruby and gold stalks with lushly textured greens, far more than I knew what to do with. I was grateful for the program that took P-Patch produce to food banks and other support organizations. P-Patch gardeners were encouraged to “grow a row” for charity, and more than twenty thousand pounds of vegetables were donated annually. That summer some of those pounds were chard from my little plot.

Pulling the chard felt cruel and wasteful—left alone, the plants would produce all winter and into spring. After spending months encouraging them to grow, watering and weeding them, how could I rip out these plants and toss them on the compost heap? It felt
wrong
.

I sent an email to my permaculture class. Did anyone want chard plants? I got a few replies, and one night I stood under the covered entrance to my front door passing off rainbow chard in the shadowy dark. I felt like a dealer, trafficking in something illicit, but I was happy my plants were going to good homes. I hadn't known how gutting it would feel to raze a garden in mid-bloom, to undo months of work and care. I salvaged as much as
I could, composted the rest, and left town in the late days of summer. It was all far harder than I expected.

It was November before I returned to Seattle. By then leaves had fallen off trees, the city turned gray and brown, the days short, dark. I drove up to Picardo and stood on the sidewalk overlooking the garden. The year-round plots had been put to bed but were still recognizable. The seasonal side was not. Paths and plots were gone. The stands of sunflowers and dahlias, towers of pole beans, fragrant basil, rows of corn: It was all gone. Only dirt remained. Summer had packed up and gone home like the circus. It made me want to cry.

When I received a postcard in the mail that winter asking if I wanted to renew my garden plot at Picardo for another year, I checked the box that said “no.” That autumn my mother had bought the house with the large, overgrown garden. Come spring we would both be gardening there. There would be no ripping up plants at the end of a season. This was for the long haul. Together we might be able to grow something that would last.

M
Y SISTER-IN-LAW LIKED TO
name things: houses, cars, boats. My favorite was the car she had when the girls were first born: a silver vehicle she called Jane Honda.

My family had never done anything like that. Once, long ago, my brother and I tried to name our mother's faded Volvo Big Blue, after a whale in a children's book. But not even that stuck for long. It felt a little silly.

Our houses were never named either—they were called by the names of the streets they stood on: Creamery Road, Pine Hill, Longfellow, Montford. My 1910 flat in San Francisco was Seventh Avenue.

But perhaps my sister-in-law was rubbing off on us, because we did call the house I lived in when I first moved to Seattle The Treehouse. It was tall and narrow and surrounded by the green trees of the Arboretum. But mostly we called it that because Twenty-sixth Avenue East doesn't have much of a ring to it.

With this new house, however, my mother wanted a name. Although she had one in mind already, she asked the girls. “What should we call it?” They paused to consider, small foreheads furrowing in concentration.

“We could call it Fruit House,” said Abby, who remembered the first day we spent there, eating juicy Asian pears and picking blackberries.

My mother smiled, then offered her choice.

“How about Orchard House?”

We all liked the ring of that.

I'd read somewhere that an orchard can be made up of as few as five trees—by that definition we had one. When the blackberries were finally cleared, they revealed twelve fruit trees. I imagined them like people imprisoned too long, now blinking up at unexpected light, stretching branches, luxuriating in the feeling of sun on their leaves at long last.

When the final tally was made, we had three apple trees, two pears, two Asian pears, two plums, one fig, and two trees whose identity we weren't sure of. I was hoping for a sour cherry.

Of course we wanted to plant more. Part of the allure of the garden was a chance to grow on a large scale. I wanted a peach and an apricot, an Italian prune plum, persimmon, and quince. My mother wanted cherries, dark and sweet—as many as we had room for.

We had room for quite a lot. The yard stretched out long and narrow. Most of the existing fruit trees were arranged in a border along the back fence and up the sunny south side. The rest of the yard was open space—former lawn now beginning to grow wild. My mother had a thing against mowing.

It was still winter, a season that lingers in the Northwest, and my mother had been in Seattle five months. The city was wet and mossy, the trees not yet leafed out. It was the time of year
most charitably described as the season of mud. It wasn't time to plant a garden yet. It was, however, a good time to plant trees.

In permaculture, when you buy a piece of land, it is recommended you do nothing for the first year. Just observe. This way you can learn how the sun moves across the property in all seasons, where the shadows fall. You can see the flow of wind: where the protected spaces are, what gets buffeted. You learn about water, where it puddles, where it drains.

This way when you plant, you won't put tomatoes in a spot that gets afternoon shade; you won't plant corn where it is windy; you won't place your bulbs in a wet bog—the moisture there will rot them, and come spring you'll have nothing to show for it.

How many people have the time and patience to do this? We certainly did not.

“Start with trees,” my permaculture teacher Jenny had said. “It's pretty easy to figure out where the trees should be.”

But planting a tree is serious business. Unlike with tomatoes, you can't just rip out a tree at the end of the season if you've discovered it's not in a good spot. Fruit trees can bear for more than a hundred years. If the trees flourished and the property stayed in the family, it was possible the niecelets' future children and grandchildren could eat applesauce made from the fruit of these trees. It's not something you want to get wrong.

Because trees are such serious business, we decided to bring in Jenny, to make sure our overall plan was a good one. When she's not teaching, Jenny Pell designs and consults on permaculture installations all over the world. And in the slow season, early in the spring, she was offering a discount on her consultation rate.

Jenny was lead instructor for the six-month permaculture course I had taken the previous year. One weekend out of the month our group gathered to learn about rainwater harvesting, sheet mulching, and how to construct a proper compost pile. We
built a pond, planned a productive cottage garden, experimented with grafting fruit trees, and set up a shiitake-mushroom-growing operation. We also learned about food forests.

These ancient agricultural systems walk the line between wild and cultivated. The plants are selected to thrive together but minimally maintained. It's a complex system with overstory canopy trees to provide fruit or nuts, smaller trees and fruit-bearing bushes, perennial vegetables, ground cover, and even a layer under the soil of roots and tubers that may also be edible. To look at it is to see a forest, but one capable of providing food for a family or community.

Looking at the back of the yard, the wild meadow that was sprouting, the trees that were already there, I imagined a food forest. Or at least an orchard that would provide more than just fruit from trees. There could be greens and herbs growing among them. We could have multiple harvests. It just came down to the right plan.

Because I had only ever seen commercial orchards, that was how I planned it: trees planted in rows. I figured three rows of three across the meadow—nine more trees to add to the collection for a total of twenty-one.

“Oh, no,” Jenny said when she saw my carefully drawn plans. “You don't want to do that.”

This was exactly what I needed—a teacher to check my work. I may have been given a certificate in permaculture design when I finished the class, but that didn't mean I knew what I was doing.

Jenny looked at the aerial-view drawing I had made of the backyard and erased the trees I had planned in rows. “Before you decide on trees, think about the paths,” she explained. “But don't plan—just think about where you walk naturally. That's where the paths should be.”

My mother and I drew the routes we tended to take—from the downstairs door to the greenhouse. From the greenhouse to
the compost pile. As we traced our patterns through the landscape, a structure of paths emerged.

“Then you want to plant the trees in a circle.” Jenny looked at the established fruit trees, at hard angles along the rear of the property. She took the pencil and marked a series of trees that would soften the angle, surrounding the meadow in a semicircular embrace. Rather than rows cutting straight across, her plan encompassed what was already there and brought it into balance.

“Hey,” I said, looking at the new map. “It looks like a person.”

The trees around the meadow now resembled a head; the main path that led to the house served as body and legs. The north–south route from greenhouse to compost pile formed arms.

Jenny smiled. “It's like that in permaculture,” she said. “The plans always end up looking like people.”

This was not the first time my family had planted fruit trees. Years ago, in the countryside of Northern California, my mom had wanted fruit in her garden. The old house I grew up in had come with apple trees large enough to climb, a few tall walnuts, and two plums—one yellow, one red—whose tiny fruit ended up all over the ground. One of my most hated childhood summer chores had been collecting gushy plums, sticky warm and starting to ferment in the sun.

My mother had wanted more: pears, cherries, a peach. She ordered them from a garden catalog sent from some far-off and slightly mysterious location.

I remember the day we got the call that the trees had arrived. We walked two blocks down the road to our small-town post office. It was next to the restaurant that catered to city folks out exploring the country, the only other business in town.

When she saw us coming, the postmistress heaved a large
parcel wrapped in brown construction paper onto the counter. It was a bumpy, fat cylinder, taller than I was and far wider. We carried it back to the house and into the backyard—my brother and me trying to help, our small hands barely able to grasp the fat package, so excited to unwrap the trees. We were not expecting what happened next.

My mother stood there looking blankly at the spindly saplings, a bunch of twigs bundled together. “I'm not sure which end is the roots and which is the branches,” she said.

We looked at the long, dark twig-trees. It really was hard to tell. There were no arrows pointing:
This way up
.

“I think they go this way,” my mother said, propping them upright. “No.” She frowned and turned them around. “Maybe this way.”

We tried one side, then another, until we got it right. At least we hoped we had it right. Only time would tell.

Time did tell, and the trees did grow. The cherry and peach never flourished—it was a yearly battle with peach leaf curl and a yearly battle with the birds who got most of the sour cherries, despite our cloaking the tree in black netting each summer.

But the pear trees took root and thrived: through the severe drought of the seventies, when they were watered with runoff from our bathwater and washing machine; through the flood of the early eighties that led to our move away from the country. Each fall we had pears. I was too young to know about fruit varieties; it would be years before I heard the names Bartlett, Bosc, and d'Anjou. I thought of them only as brown pears and golden pears. I liked the juicy golden ones the best.

When I think of those pears now, I think of my mother undertaking that life in the country—though clearly she did not have the knowledge required. She learned along the way; she taught herself, and she taught us, through trial and error. It wasn't a madcap adventure either. We weren't playing farmer. My father had left us with nothing, contributed nothing toward our support,
and there were no other resources. My mother could not have afforded to buy those pears at the market, but she could plant a tree and tend it and, with effort and patience, she could feed her children sweet fruit each fall.

The last time I saw those trees, their tops had grown level with the second-floor window. It's been years since I've been back, but I imagine the pear trees my mother planted are still going strong. Golden pears and brown pears each fall, to feed the children who live there now.

There was no trouble telling branches from roots on the trees my mother bought the first spring she was in Seattle. They came, still spindly and twiglike, but with their bases bundled in burlap. Some came from the nursery, some from a nearby plant sale. It was hard not to buy fruit trees that spring—and hard to stop once we'd started. Who wouldn't want a mess of peaches, plums, cherries, quince? A fruit tree is an investment in happiness, in sweetness, in jam. Every time I considered the potential, I couldn't say no.

When our spring buying spree was over, we had four cherry trees, one peach, a pluot, a quince, a persimmon, an Italian prune plum—and one final pear, to make sure we would have both golden and brown fruit in the fall. Orchard House, indeed.

Jenny may have guided our design plan, but it was still daunting to place the trees in the ground. You had to look at this stick of a sapling and imagine it big, imagine it in ten years, in fifty. This is the challenge of gardening: to see what is there now and to allow for what will grow. It is an exercise in imagination, in hope, in faith.

My mother was not very good at it. Hope and faith have never been her gig.

“Oh, no—that's not the right spot.” I had arrived at the garden, after a day of work at home, to find my mom had planted
the peach tree. “It's too close to the pear—see how it throws off the whole circle? It needs to be planted here.” I strode a couple of yards to the left.

“I thought we would put the cherry there.”

“The cherry should go here.” I paced out a few more yards to the side and stood there. “This way, when it grows, the canopy won't run into that apple tree.”

When I closed my eyes, I could see it—the trees bigger, the open meadow ringed by leafy green, shade where now there was just sun.

My mother couldn't see it—she has never been one to gamble on what was not already there. She deals in absolutes: bills, deadlines, hard work. But here, at least, she trusted me.

She shrugged. “Okay, we'll move it.”

Neither of us was digging the holes for the fruit trees. That task fell to Don, a man my mother had hired to do some odd jobs around the house and yard. He was the one who had to dig yet another large hole—about four feet across—to move the peach tree into. When he heard the news, he shrugged; he was being paid by the hour.

My mother had done some renovations to the house when she moved in. The hardwood floors were refinished, the downstairs wet bar taken out, and new carpeting and flooring laid throughout. The upstairs layout would always be odd, but the one eyesore that remained was the bathroom.

I suggested gutting the narrow upstairs bath and putting in a Japanese soaking tub, but that was another idea my mother couldn't quite envision. Instead she had the boxy cabinet ripped out and replaced with a pedestal sink, an attempt to give the narrow room more space. Don was doing the installation.

That's what was happening when we heard shouts in the upstairs bathroom and came running. Something had gone wrong and water was pouring out from under the bathroom door, into the hallway, headed for the stairs. I grabbed a large
bath towel from the top of the laundry hamper and was about to lay it down to stop the flow.

“No!” my mom exclaimed.
“Wait.”