IF AN ORCHARD, TECHNICALLY, was as few as five trees, we now had an orchard four times over. There were twenty trees, most of them planted in a wide semicircle around the back meadow. There were apples, pears, Asian pears, a peach, a fig, three plums, and four cherries. My mother was a great believer in cherries.
When compared with vegetable gardening, orcharding is a sedate and relaxed pastime. There is minimal weeding or watering needed. For most of the year, the trees do their thing—and reward you with a harvest each fall. It is a satisfying effort-to-yield ratio. Tending an orchard, at least a small orchard, is almost leisurely.
This is not to say that there is no work. It’s just that you could go out of town for a week or two at a time—even in summer—and your orchard would probably be fine. Growing fruit trees is like being an aunt or uncle—you need to show up for important events and give love, but you’re not the parent; you don’t have to be there every day.
I don’t remember us doing anything to the fruit trees of my childhood. The apple trees my brother and I climbed were old and established, and the trees we planted either flourished or faltered. All we did was despair over the peach leaf curl, eat all the pears, and wrap the cherry in black netting in the hopes of foiling the birds (it never worked). In Washington, however, we soon learned that growing fruit requires a bit more effort.
In this state known for apples, there was something called an apple codling moth. These are the “worms” shown poking out of shiny red apples in children’s books. Not worms at all—they are the larval state of a gray-colored moth that lays eggs in apple and pear trees. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the fruit for energy. Eventually they cocoon and emerge as a moth, but by then your apples are ruined.
Codling moths weren’t the worst of the bunch—wormholes can be cut out if you’re not too fussy. Worse were the apple maggot flies, whose larvae left the fruit laced with tiny, threadlike trails of brown. The apples might look rosy and ripe on the tree, but cut one open and disappointment waits within. The apple is useless—destined to soften and rot quickly.
“What are we supposed to do about it?” I asked my mother when we were both in the back meadow by the apple trees. She had been researching apple tree problems.
“You have to put little socks over each of the apples and pears.”
“You’re kidding, right? We’re going to put socks on the trees? That’s ridiculous.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to do. They’re made out of this nylon stuff—like panty hose.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yup—one sock on each apple.”
I remembered trees I had seen in Japan, where farmers carefully wrapped each fruit in a white paper bag. From a distance it looked like the trees were covered with large white flowers. It seemed insanely time-consuming, but I knew the Japanese desire for perfection—and how much they were willing to pay for it. Their orchards also ran small. Such attention to detail would be possible only on a limited scale.
“You’re telling me those huge orchards in eastern Washington put a panty hose sock on each and every apple they grow?”
“Of course not,” my mom said. “They probably use chemical sprays, but we’re not going to do that.”
An orchard might not be as hands-on as a vegetable garden, but it was not without its labor. Apparently socks were involved.
Ours was not the only orchard with old apple trees in Seattle. Also in the northern part of the city lay Piper’s Orchard, whose history stretched much further back than ours. Planted by a German immigrant family that had run a bakery and confectionary before the turn of the century, Piper’s Orchard had actually been lost for years.
When the Piper family’s bakery burned down in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, they moved north, to what was then the outskirts of the city, a wild and undeveloped place. They lived in old logging cabins and used a cookhouse built over a creek that ran down through the canyons. Butter and milk were suspended through a hole in the floor into the cold water of Piper’s Creek to be kept chilled.
It was Mrs. Piper—Wilhelmina or “Minna”—who planted the orchard. There were more than thirty apple trees, in addition to a few pears and cherries. Her husband baked the fruit into his confections. The family also sold produce from the garden and water lilies they grew in a large pond. They had eleven children: One was close friends with the daughter of Chief Seattle; another started a sporting goods store later purchased by a man named Eddie Bauer.
The Pipers’ land was sold in the 1920s, purchased by the Carkeek family, and given to the city as a park. It was a wild place—densely wooded canyons and steep slopes. On the sunny hillside that Minna Piper had tended, blackberry vines and ivy quickly overcame the trees, and her orchard lay lost and forgotten for more than fifty years.
The orchard was rediscovered in 1981, by a landscape architect hired by the city to create a master plan for restoring the wilderness park. It took more than two years of work by weekend volunteers to cut back the dense thicket that had grown over the orchard. When asked why they would go to such effort, one of the volunteers replied, “This is living history.”
By the time I arrived in Seattle, the orchard of vintage trees was fully restored and tended by a volunteer group called Friends of Piper’s Orchard. They planned work parties and a harvest festival in the fall that included cider pressing, pies, and apple tasting, and in the early summer, they put socks on the fruit to protect against the apple maggot and the codling moth. One day in May, I left the garden to join them in the orchard.
Piper’s Orchard is not car accessible. To reach it you must leave your car at one of two trailheads and walk into the park on a wide dirt path that winds along Piper’s Creek. Sunlight filters down through tall trees and makes dappled patterns on the mossy rocks and ferns by the creek. The hum of the city falls away. Suddenly, the woods open up to reveal a sunny hillside planted with gnarled old apple trees. The day I went to the orchard, there were two men, both perched on orchard ladders, wrapping each apple in a beige nylon sock. Apparently my mother had been right.
One of the men came down the high ladder and introduced himself as Don Ricks, a steward of the orchard. He set me up with a bag of nylon socks—called footies—and showed me a few shorter trees I could work on without need of a ladder. Orchard ladders have steps on one side, but the other side balances on a single pole. This allows for closer access to the trees but is less stable than traditional ladders; they take some getting used to.
Don and the other man were both professional arborists. This was their weekend volunteer gig. As I stood in the May sunshine, reaching up to wrap each infant apple in its own cocoon, I heard them bantering back and forth, talking shop, telling stories of pruning adventures and challenges.
I was thinking of Minna Piper, who had grafted these trees. Fruit trees do not grow true—if you plant the seed of your Red Delicious apple, you will not grow a Red Delicious. What you grow will be a surprise, a mix of the parent tree and some other variety—the pollen of which has been carried along to your tree. In dog terms, you’ll get a mutt. Occasionally you’ll get an interesting mix, but often the resulting apples will be inedible.
To grow a Red Delicious, a bud or branch from a Red Delicious tree must be grafted onto the roots of another. It’s not unlike those children’s books that match the bottom half of one creature to the top half of another. If you’ve done it right, the Red Delicious bud will grow and bear fruit.
I had learned to graft in permaculture class, fascinated by fusing together the cambium growth layers of two trees, a process that felt a little like concocting my own Frankenstein’s monster. That summer, when I was on the island, I had noticed chokecherry trees scattered around my mother’s cabin. Could I graft real cherries onto them? Could I seed the woods with edible fruit?
“Think of the possibility for cities,” my permaculture teacher Jenny had said. “All those blooming plum trees planted along streets could be grafted into edible plums. Think of how much food we could produce.”
Like most homesteaders, Minna Piper had grafted a variety of apples—orchards filled with one variety are modern industrial developments. Homesteaders chose a selection of apples that would come ripe at different times—some good for storage, some for cider, some for eating. Piper’s Orchard featured a rare German variety called Bietigheimer, as well as the Albemarle Pippin, known to be a favorite apple of Thomas Jefferson.
When we stopped for a break, Don Ricks told me about the old trees in the area—the oldest apple tree in the state at Fort Vancouver, the pear tree in Edmonds thought to be more than a hundred years old. When I asked him why he was so interested in vintage trees, he rubbed his head, a sheepish half smile on his face. “As I get older myself, I care more about the older trees,” he said. “If you take care of them, there can be a lot of productivity in them still.”
I left that day with the business cards of both men. We needed to find someone to prune our trees, and anyone passionate enough to spend their free time doing the same work they did all week, dedicated to preserving and protecting older trees, seemed a good candidate to me.
The first year we didn’t prune the trees. There was just so much to do—we planted nearly a dozen more fruit trees, hacked back the blackberries, set up the side garden, and established vegetable beds. Then my mother left for the summer, and I spent the entire season trying to keep up with the growth of a productive garden: the watering, the weeds, the produce.
A farmer I once interviewed said summer was like a train pulling out of the station, and he was the passenger running to jump on board. But the train just got faster and faster, and all he could do was keep running all summer long. Sometimes the train slowed down and he almost caught it—he almost got on top of all the work—but then it sped up again. The entire season he was sprinting, just trying to keep up.
At the end of my first summer in the garden, I knew exactly what he meant. When my mother came back from Canada, I couldn’t wait to leave. I was tired of weeding and watering and trying to catch up to the train that was summer. I was sick of the garden. I hightailed it to San Francisco and stayed for nearly a month.
My mother called a few times while I was gone. Perhaps I should have picked up on the low-grade panic in her voice, but I didn’t. I was busy packing up my San Francisco apartment, saying good-bye to a city I loved, panicked that I might have made the wrong decision in choosing Seattle. Garden problems were the least of my worries.
“Can I use your dehydrator?” my mom asked on the phone one day.
“Sure, it’s in the garage. The instruction booklet is inside.”
“Oh, good, I want to make apple chips.”
“That’s easy. Just make sure to cut them thin enough, or else they take forever to dry.”
“Okay, I will. We have so many apples.”
I should have noticed—my mom doing anything with food, her tone when she said “so many apples.” But I didn’t. I often bought a case or two of apples in the fall, when prices were low and you got an extra discount for buying the box. Apple chips were easy; even my mom could manage that.
It wasn’t until I came back to Seattle and found myself in my mother’s kitchen that I really understood. That day I opened one of the large cupboards, and the entire thing was filled with jars of apple chips in a crazy variety of sizes. It looked like my mother had become a survivalist who stocks food in preparation for the doomsday. A very odd survivalist who planned to survive on dried fruit alone. That’s when I realized: an apple tree, an orchard, can provide a lot of fruit.
We were not the only ones dealing with the generosity of an autumn fruit harvest. My friends Melinda and Brian had bought a house in the northern part of the city on a steep hill with a view of snowcapped mountains. There was a yard they were beginning to landscape, which ran long and ended at a large pear tree.
Melinda told me their first autumn in the house they had been overwhelmed with pears. These days most people are not versed in the ways of food preservation. Melinda and Brian worked full-time and could not keep up with the fruit. The pears quickly began to rot and draw flies. “We ended up digging a huge hole, piling them in there, and burying them,” she said. “We just didn’t know what to do with them all.”
Seattle was dotted with fruit trees, many of which went untended and unharvested. In fall it was not uncommon to see apple trees in the grass parking strips between street and sidewalk surrounded by fallen and rotting fruit. This was the sight that spurred Gail Savina to start a nonprofit in Seattle called City Fruit. If you had a fruit tree you couldn’t keep up with, you could call and offer your harvest. City Fruit’s volunteer pickers would come and pick your fruit, which was then donated to local food banks, shelters, or senior centers. It was an elegant solution designed for people in the same situation as Melinda and Brian.
My friend Knox had run the fruit-harvesting program in his neighborhood. My second summer in Seattle, when I had only a P-Patch garden to look after, I occasionally spent an afternoon perched on a ladder, picking plums with Knox. The fruit smelled musty and sweet in the sun, like brown sugar, and when we dropped the crates off at the food bank and I saw people lining up to the end of the block for packages of white bread, day-old pastries, and canned food, I felt glad we had saved this food from rotting on the ground. In a city where fruit sometimes went ignored and unharvested, people were still going hungry.
“I hired someone to prune the fruit trees,” my mother announced one day when I was working in the garden.
“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.