Planting apple trees

Includes works by Orwell and Solnit

Photo by Artur Łuczka on Unsplash

When I moved out to the countryside, one of the first things I wanted was to plant an apple tree. It felt like a chance to fulfil a duty to the world. I imagined the tree living for generations beyond me, feeding children whose existence I’d never witness.

I mentioned this to someone in town not long after I moved in. She told me about a pear tree in her own garden.

Her grandmother, she said, had known the pear tree well when she was a small girl. She had not lived in that house, but as it happened her best friend had lived there back then. The two girls would play in the garden and eat the fruit when the impulse took them. Her grandmother had often spoken of it, and there was even a photo of the tree from that time, with her grandmother, a very tiny child, standing beside it.

And this past summer, my neighbour said, she had picked a ripe pear from that tree and mashed it up for her own baby grandson.

So she knew exactly what I meant.

Yes!” I said. Yes.

Five generations of her family eating fruit from a single tree. What a glorious thing. It was exactly what I meant.

Photo by khloe arledge on Unsplash

The following autumn two apple trees went into my garden here, two little saplings in the middle of the grass that makes up the largest part of the garden space.

I’m so happy that they exist. I love the notion of them feeding people far into the future.

But lately it’s disturbed me to realize how much my sense of the garden has been tied up with notions like that, of duty and care and stewardship, and how little with the idea of making decisions for my own sake, for my own pleasure.

A few weeks after I moved in, I wanted to clear away some of the debris that had accumulated during the earlier part of the winter.

It was just leaves and small fallen branches, nothing too heavy, but too much to try to bundle into my arms and carry over to the compost heap that a gardener friend had suggested the placement of.

I called him and asked him what to do. I hadn’t had a garden since I was little.

“Didn’t I see a wheelbarrow there?” he asked.

I was astonished. Of course he had seen a wheelbarrow. It was old and sturdy and green, and was parked beside the garden shed.

I had looked at it on my daily walks around the garden. I had admired it, and thought about William Carlos Williams’s wonderful poem (please see the link in the footnote if you don’t know it),¹ and about how moving to the countryside was a chance to connect to physical things, to the presence of tangible objects after so long a time focusing mostly on words and ideas.

But it hadn’t occurred to me that I was allowed to move the wheelbarrow, or to use it. It hadn’t occurred to me that it belonged to me now.

The same was true for the garden as a whole. I knew that it belonged to me, but in a kind of confused stewardship sense, not in a sense of ownership: I thought of it as something that I had a duty to maintain, as if in moving into the house I had also taken on the job of keeping up a public park. I worried about the upkeep of the trees, and what I was supposed to do for the plants that were there, and how to keep all the grass mowed.

I worried too about the existence of the grass itself. Grass like this doesn’t feed anything, not birds nor insects, and I felt that I was harming the environment by having so much essentially neutral space. I didn’t know whether my duty was to keep the grass (stewardship of the garden as it was) or to get rid of it (stewardship of nature as a whole). My gardener friend reassured me on the second: I live in the countryside. The birds and insects have many other sources of food around here.

But it never occurred to me that I could change the grass, not just for the sake of the birds and insects, but simply because I, myself, would like to be surrounded by more life than a grassy field.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It’s also not as though the garden was always the way it is now. From the 1920s, when the first owners of the house were raising their children, all the way through the 1950s when their grandchildren would come to visit, this space was full of life.

Apple, pear and plum trees were down by the stream, near where the pig and some geese were kept, and where there was a pump house for watering the garden.

Photo by Josie Weiss on Unsplash

My nearest neighbor, W., who was born in the 1940s, used to sneak in when he was little and steal the plums. Sometimes he was driven away by the vigilant and shockingly aggressive geese.

“They were the best plums in the world,” he told me, still smiling 70 years later, “and the geese were the meanest geese.”

The rest of the garden grew enough vegetables to support a large household. The house was too late to have its own flax crop, but it sounds as though it was otherwise largely self-sustaining for a very long time.

I don’t know why everything was changed over to mostly grass, but I’ve heard some suggestions: the fruit trees probably grew old and had to be taken down. The vegetable garden would have been difficult to maintain. Grass was far easier, and wonderful for children to run around and play in. Unlike me, many of my guests love the park-like feel of it, and presumably previous owners did also.

And I don’t mean to say that the space itself isn’t beautiful. The stream runs along one side and then vanishes into the forest. One sees frogs beside it, and I’m told that there are crayfish and tiny salmon. Once or twice I’ve startled wild ducks there, and I have hope that one spring I’ll walk by and see a little duck family settling in, with ducklings on the way.

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

There is a self-seeded damson plum tree, and any number of lilacs and roses. There is also a butterfly bush, some prehensile blackberry brambles, and a small flowerbed with a handful of perennials.

But I’ve had confused notions of duty when it came to the existing plants also. My gardener friend told me that the roses needed pruning, and showed me how to do it. The first time I did it on my own, pruning the largest rose, which had been trained up onto a wooden trellis, I worried that I was doing it wrong, that I was being too extreme or aggressive, that I was failing in my duty to the plant. I couldn’t figure out the boundaries, in fact, between duty and kindness and unkindness.

Photo by Tiffany Chan on Unsplash

My neighbour W. killed weeds without a second thought, but he yelled at me when he saw that I was watering the flowers in the flowerbed with too little water, holding the hose for too short a time over each one. “You’re tricking them into thinking that there is water there,” he said. “It’s cruel.”

W. showed me how to water correctly, but I found weeding difficult. I couldn’t draw the emotional line that he had between plants that were owed kindness and plants that were to be destroyed.

Sometimes a stray wildflower beside the planted perennials would be so pretty that I would decide to leave it in. Then I’d pull up the next weed beside it, and cringe at the thought that I was deciding what would live and what would die.

Sometimes I would be able to get past that, to get into the rhythm and pull out many weeds in a row. Then I would feel that I had grown hardened, no longer caring that these living things were dying at my hand, and feel worse than even before.

Weeding out the flowerbed was all very different from my memory of The Secret Garden,² which I read over and over when I was small. There, the main character finds an abandoned garden and does only good, pulling the weeds away from the choked roses and crocuses and giving them room to breathe again. I had loved that. I never thought about the welfare of the weeds back then, but now that it was my own hands in action it was hard to put aside.

I hesitated before putting those last few paragraphs into this essay. It’s ridiculous to be sitting there worrying about the well-being of the weeds in one’s garden. But I am leaving the paragraphs in, in case others have struggled with similar emotions.

The world is complex, and of course we know perfectly well that we cannot eat without weeding and killing the plants we harvest, or animals if we eat meat.³

But just because it’s ridiculous does not mean that we cannot acknowledge that the process of weeding can bring up emotions that shape our experiences as gardeners.

Michael Pollan’s book on gardening grapples with this, a little, in the context of building a fence. He says that he started out not wanting to compete with nature, but eventually realised that he, too, was part of nature; that imposing our will on the world around us is part of being alive, that humans are not outside of the natural system.⁴

Photo by Marc Pell on Unsplash

Long after I had planted the apple trees, I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s recent book on George Orwell and was reminded — because she opens with it — of a short essay of his that I had completely forgotten.

I had first read it when I was a teenager, along with all of his other collected non-fiction. In this, “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” he essentially says that planting a tree for future generations is one of the most moral acts that a human being can perform.

Solnit doesn’t mention it, but he lingers for a few sentences on one particular kind of tree, a sort of apple, and points out that the sapling he planted will still be giving fruit after 100 years.⁵ I must have longed for that, as a teenager: to do something worthwhile that would still be giving fruit after 100 years.

It’s quite possible that I’ve wanted to plant an apple tree for most of my life entirely because of that essay. But again, the confusion: Orwell is writing about trees and roses that he planted, and then left. The entire piece is on planting things for the benefit of others.

It’s not that I didn’t want a garden for my own sake. It’s just that, as with using the wheelbarrow, it hadn’t occurred to me that it was an option. It shakes me, a little, to realize how much I had not seen pleasing myself as an option.

Lately I’ve been sorting through some of this confusion, and have begun to figure out what is doable and affordable and maintainable with this little piece of land.

In the spring I’ll do my best to start to restore it to something that nourishes both me and the world. I’ll put in bulbs, and plant vegetables, and try to replace the grass with meadow flowers that will please the local bees. I’ll prune and weed what needs to be weeded, without cultivating indifference.

The old green wheelbarrow has been much used since that first time more than three years ago. One can hope that the garden that begins this spring will be the same.

1. William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow

2. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911

3. Even in, say, fruitarianism, where one only eats food that has ripened and fallen away from its mother plant, there are still the microbes on the ground or on our skin that we destroy every time time we take a step or wash our hands.

4. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Michael Pollan, Grove Press, New York, 1991, p.48

5. Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit, Granta, 2021. Her discussion of the Vicar of Bray essay is on pp. 7-10. While the book is open, I have to share a couple of passages of hers that I loved. She writes:

Pursuits like [gardening] can bring you back to Earth from the ether and the abstractions. They could be imagined as the opposite of writing. Writing is a murky business: you are never entirely sure what you are doing or when it will be finished and whether you got it right and how it will be received months or years or decades after you finish. What it does, if it does anything, is a largely imperceptible business that takes place in the minds of people you will mostly never see and never hear from (unless they want to argue with you). [….] What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination; you can describe a battlefield, a birth, a muddy road, or a smell — Orwell would become famous for all the stenches mentioned in his books — but it is still black letters on a white page, with no real blood or mud or boiled cabbage.

A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect. (pp. 43-44)