In his latest post from Oregon, our foreign correspondent and seed guru Nick Routledge sees the wood for the trees:
Sorting though Scion stock at the Portland propogation fair. Picture:Marianna Copene
I spent Saturday at the Home Orchard Society propagation fair, in Portland, about two hours to my north. That's as far as I have traveled in years. The event is where the fruit-tree geeks assemble every spring to share scion wood.
Scion wood? Look closely at most young fruit trees and a few inches above the ground you will see a bulbous part of the stem. That is scarring tissue from a join, no less. Yes, most fruit trees are actually two trees in one, a named variety - such as 'Cox Pippin' or ''Brown Russet' - grafted ('stuck') onto a rootstock variety. Rootstocks determine, among other characteristics, the size of the tree - dwarf, semi-dwarf or standard. And then, of course, the variety grafted onto the rootstock determines much of the rest of the character of the tree and the type of apple or pear or plum or otherwise that grows on it. What we refer to as 'scion wood' is the varietal cutting (typically about 3"-4" long) we graft onto the rootstock.
At the propagation fair, hundreds of varieties of scion woods are made available for free - they are collected by volunteers when the wood is dormant in mid-winter, then kept in a cool place to prevent them 'budding out' in the rising temperatures of spring. Right now is the season for grafting. The sap is rising in the rootstock and the scion wood, still dormant, has yet to 'break bud'. Timing is critical. To simplify, graft too soon, and there is not enough 'oomph' in the scion and rootstock to bond the two: and if the scion wood is too-far-along, it will demand more food than the yet-to-heal join will allow for, and it will die before the graft takes. Fruit geeks descend upon the fair to access varieties of fruit that are otherwise impossible to come by. Most of the varieties available there are not offered as fruit trees by commercial nurseries.
I'm exploring a fascinating territory just now, it feels. Storage varieties of fruit. Though I preserve large quantities of fruit each summer and autumn and nibble on it constantly, I also find myself hungry for fresh fruit year-round. Fresh fruit with my morning oats, every day, has emerged as a fundamental impulse in very recent years. From June through the Fall, it's strawberries, with raspberries, blackberries, currants and gooseberries when they are available. I can't seem to grow blueberries, but friends will pass them my way. Throughout the winter, it's dried and/or canned fruit with my morning oats, with a fresh, diced apple. I've got to have that fresh apple. Can't explain it. I was never a big fresh fruit eater until the last couple of years. But apples are one of the few things I make trips to the store for.
How to close that fresh fruit loop, locally? Well, I have recently learned that I can harvest specific varieties of apples in late autumn that will keep, I'm told, through June the following year - until the strawberries kick in. Some pears too, perhaps. Now these varieties of apples and pears are not commonly grown these days because where people are growing fruit trees, they generally don't have 'keepers' in mind.
If I was going to find them anywhere, it was going to be at this weekend's scion wood swap. I had been talking with old timers in the run up to the event, and doing a fair amount of reading research, so I hit the chaostrophy of the fair - hundreds of people, scrambling for scions - with a wishlist. And sure enough, I found most of what I was looking for. I brought the material home and began grafting onto rootstock on Sunday and I'm still at it. Apples, pears and some plum varieties I had been after for fresh-eating and canning.
On Monday, a friend arrived with a reference text allowing me to learn more about the provenance of the varieties I had secured. "White Winter Pearman: Oldest known English apple; dates back to 1200 A.D....Fine-grained, crisp, tender, juicy flesh. Pleasantly rich aromatic flavor. Fine quality, all-purpose apple. Excellent keeper. Tree is a healthy, vigorous grower; bears regularly and heavily. Splendid vitality; widely adaptable." And "Eospus Spitzenberg: Thomas Jefferson's favorite; dessert apple for connoisseurs. Average to good when tree ripe; radically improves in storage. Best at Christmas; keeps until May," and so on. I'm quite struck by the lineage of these trees - each piece of scion wood in my possession is from a 'clone' of a clone of a clone and so on, all the way back to the original parent. A living lineage, unbroken. What have these trees seen? Who has eaten from them? The mythos of my garden evolves.
I must admit to an 'impulse' scion. When I passed over the label attached to the cup holding pear scion wood for 'Vicar of Winkfield,' I paused and smiled. 'Vicar' isn't a word commonly heard Stateside. We don't have them. And a winking vicar, too. Into my bucket, labelled, it went. Sure enough, research reveals a religious heritage. Originally discovered by a French priest in 1760, where it picked up the name Monsieur Le Cure, the apple was introduced to England by the Reverend William Lewis Rham of Winkfield, apparently a highly regarded 'agriculturist'. The pear, an 'excellent keeper.' I recall reading somewhere that 'Avalon' means 'land of apples.' Avalon, my garden.
I found Saturday's event an interesting 'meeting of the tribes.' I've been organizing seedswaps for a good while now - the very-similar vegetable-equivalent of the scion-wood swap. Where Home Orchard Society types do fruit, my closest tribe does veggies. Pre-event emailing prompted a Saturday rendez-vous with a fruit geek. I passed along vegetable and med seed (among them, a couple of very impressive toms that came out of E. Europe last winter, locally-developed August-maturing OP melons (our cool summer nights make it difficult to mature melons in a timely fashion hereabouts), and an immuno-stimulant that has picked up strong impetus among local medicine-makers in recent years, complete with written instructions) and he passed over fruit material (grapes, gooseberries, figs etc.) Big smiles both sides in this small, private exchange that felt to me as if it was a foundational communion of horti-cultures. South meets north. Veggies meet fruit. Hearts embrace. Very friendly indeed it was.
Tree-people and people-trees, and events supporting them, have been together for centuries have they not? Add vegetables and the veggie tribe to that rich co-evolutionary mix and, locally at least, a whole new field of synergistic possibilities emerges. At least that's how it feels in my garden, among the scion-clippings at my feet. New friends in new places grounded in and sharing of that which most deeply sustains us. I extended my new friends at the HOS an invitation to our major seedswap in the south, in Eugene , on March 29. We will see whether the graft takes.
Now that Thomas Jefferson and I are eating of the same apple, I am reminded why my style of gardening is sometimes referred to as 'political gardening.' I like to think that Jefferson, a yeoman raised Church of England, and a celebrated horticulturalist, would appreciate the ever-evolving constitutional convention of my little garden, a touchstone so clearly informed by Eternity, cyclical, wedded to a suprahuman truth. There is a wisdom and yes, a worldly sophistication to be found in my little Eden, one rooted in the deeply, fundamentally Real, it feels.
Perhaps it was a clear understanding of the intimate, dynamic interplay between garden and polis that underpinned Jefferson's assertion that farmers were: "the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." I, however, am a gardener, and on that note Jefferson's favorite words of mine come to mind: "No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, no culture comparable to that of the garden, and though an old man I am but a young gardener." Amen.
