MY 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.”
She dashed around the corner and opened the linen closet door, grabbing a mesh bag and turning it upside down, dumping the contents onto the stream of water.
What came out of the bag was my childhood: a cascade of pieces of cloth, each bringing back memories. There was my brother’s old pillowcase with chunky trains printed on it, a faded tea towel that had hung in our kitchen in the country, a bit of yellow-flowered sheet I had stained as a child, a favorite red scarf, the remnant of a work dress my mother used to wear.
This was my mother’s ragbag—I hadn’t known such a thing existed. It was another reminder that she came from a time and a set of circumstances in which resources were valued. Even old T-shirts were not thrown away. I felt a flicker of guilt at the clothes I had consigned to the garbage can. Anything wearable went to charity shops, but stained T-shirts and ripped pajama pants I threw away. What else was I supposed to do with them?
Here my mother was, squirreling them away to use when needed. Not for the first time, I wondered if a large part of our problems in the modern age stems from the fact that we’ve been given so much we no longer see the value in a thing; we no longer know its worth.
In a hardware store a few weeks later, I saw a bag of “T-shirt rags.” They were scraps of new cotton fabric marketed as the perfect thing to clean or wipe up mess.
The two-pound bag cost $16.50.
My mother’s ragbag came from the same era, the same mentality, as having an orchard. You can’t eat the yield of an orchard by yourself—even a single fruit tree can produce too much for some families. Backyard fruit trees come from an era of home food preservation, of putting up the harvest, of canning and freezing and making applesauce. These days we buy the fruit we need for our lunches and the occasional fruit salad or pie. Most of us are not prepared for a harvest.
I was in a good position to deal with such abundance. I might not have had a ragbag, but I knew how to can and make jam. I had learned the basics long ago, from a babysitter who lived with us for several years. Lorraine had taken the gushy plums that fell on the ground—the sticky ones about to ferment—and made jam with them. Plum jam, from our trees: It tasted like summer.
Later, in high school, I taught myself to make canned treats as holiday gifts, nestling jars of chocolate sauce and jalapeño pepper jelly in decorative baskets. It must have been odd to receive such a housewife-like gift from a teenager, but I had been cooking for the family for years. The kitchen was more my domain than my mother’s.
Then I forgot about canning for a decade or so. College and starting a career left no room for putting up the harvest. Life was busy and full. I scarcely noticed it was harvest until Halloween pumpkins started showing up. My city apartment did not come with a plum tree in the backyard.
Then, while living in San Francisco, I started canning again. The urge came from the same place as the urge to grow herbs—a desire for something tangible, rooted, made by my own hand. I remember the first batch of Meyer lemon marmalade, the afternoon spent over a pot of simmering fruit and sugar waiting for it to firm up enough to jell. It took time, a slow, can’t-rush-the-clock sort of time. It took standing in the kitchen and smelling the citrus and stirring and some lazy daydreaming as well, but by the end I had twelve jars of jam, lined up and gleaming golden in the light.
That night I went to a literary event at a local bar. As I looked around the crowd of people in designer glasses and hip clothing I had an odd thought: None of you made food today. I felt proud and productive in a way I hadn’t in a long time. Like winter might come and the winds might howl, but I had made jam for my people, and whatever happened we would be all right.
I knew each of these trees in my mother’s orchard would provide for many. It might just be jam, or applesauce, or canned pears, but the winter could come, and even if the power went out and the roads were snowed under, I would have food for my people. We would be all right.
One by one, the trees were all planted, though my mother and I rarely agreed on a location. Don was forced to re-dig more than a few holes, until one day my mother called on the phone.
“Can you come up here? Don refuses to dig any more tree holes until you make sure it’s in the right place.” I was still trying to envision the big picture, to see what the orchard would grow into.
When I truly stepped back and tried to see the big picture, however, it didn’t always make sense. I may have yearned for a harvest, but my mother was in her seventies. By all rights she should have been slowing down, having a smaller and simpler life. Instead she was taking on a huge garden project, living alone in a house larger than any she had lived in before. I understood her urge to give the girls a garden, but surely a small and manageable yard filled with flowers and vegetables would do the same job. Did we really need an orchard? I confessed these concerns to my permaculture teacher.
“Your mom is in the legacy phase of her life,” Jenny said. And maybe she was right.
Maybe this whole garden was about what we leave behind, how we are remembered. My mother would not live to see the fruit trees we were planting come to full maturity. She would not see the leafy canopy they would eventually develop; she would never see these small cherry saplings covered in fruit. And still, she planted them. It reminded me of a Martin Luther quote I’d once heard: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
My mother knew all this too. The final tree we planted was a persimmon, an unusual choice for a backyard fruit tree, perhaps, but we both love them from our time spent in Asia. There persimmons are common, shiny, green-leafed trees hung with bright orange fruit like small lanterns. In the fall the fruit is dried to make a popular snack. It is not uncommon to walk through the streets in Japan and Korea and see strings of orange persimmons hung from upstairs windows, drying in the autumn sun.
There were always a few old persimmon trees that went unharvested—deep in the countryside where farmhouses had sometimes been abandoned. I loved to see them after the season’s first snow. The dark branches threw a stark relief against the white, and the brilliant orange fruit floated among them, often with a tiny cap of snow.
We planted our persimmon at the top of the side yard, in a spot that had held a dead cherry tree. It seemed right to put it there. I knew that when the fruit grew, we would pick it long before the first snow of winter fell in Seattle, but still, it made me feel happy and nostalgic for Japan.
Persimmon trees take years to bear. Unlike the cherry and plum and peach we planted, which had a good chance of producing small crops within a few years, the persimmon would take at least five years before it flowered or fruited, maybe seven.
“Well,” my mom said when we had patted the last shovelful of soil around the base of the small sapling and stood back looking at the twiggy tree. “I may never get to taste any of these persimmons—but you better enjoy them for me.”
I put my arm around her, surprised as always by how small she was becoming—fragile, in need of protection.
“I will, Mom,” I said, drawing her close. “I promise.”