Limbertwig

Mom found Tom Brown’s address in a library book. I imagine it was one of those books with a crinkled paper cover and yellowing pages and a bent-to-bits spine, the kind that smells like potting soil (because soon it will be) and is hard work to even read for fear of it disintegrating in your hands. I’m sure she was the only person to check that book out for nearly a decade. Luckily, Tom Brown’s address hadn’t changed.

There are seven thousand and five hundred unique species of apple tree in the world, two and a half thousand of those are native to the United States. If you go to a grocery store, however, you’ll be lucky to find even ten varieties of apple. Americans, like squirrels picking out seeds for winter, found the apples that work best for our pies and stuck with them. This has put the biodiversity of our apple crops at great risk. 

If every orchard is made of genetically identical Red Delicious Apple trees, and some kind of fungus arises that kills Red Delicious Apple trees, we’re in for a real un-delicious time. Tom Brown, fearing crop blight, dedicated his life to tending to the heritage apple varieties of the Appalachian mountains. In his orchard, he grows hundreds of varieties of apples with funny names like Brushy Mountain Limbertwig, Cherry Pearman, and Jonathan. 

Mom wrote to Tom Brown after reading about his apple orchard simply to thank him for the work he does and to tell him about the single-acre community garden she tended to with her high school students. Tom Brown, completely unprompted, responded to her by mailing a box containing three hundred heritage apple tree twigs to be used by her students for grafting heritage apple trees to plant at the community garden.

So that’s the story of how my mother grafted three hundred baby Appalachian apple trees with her classes of new-American high school students in the Spring of 2020. The plan was to plant the trees that survived in their community garden, building an orchard for future students. Imagine harvesting heritage apples as a snack between pre-calc and AP Lit. That was the dream. They did not have space for three hundred trees but Mom figured she would deal with that small problem when she got to it. 

Unfortunately, in March of 2020, high schools shut down completely. School was moved onto Zoom. Mom taught her high school classes from our garage. I moved home from college and cried the whole time, curled up in my childhood bedroom mourning the loss of my twenties to a global pandemic. Mom was in mourning too. She was mourning the three hundred baby apple trees that were currently quarantined in her classroom at Boise Senior High School. At dinner she’d muse about what the poor baby apple trees were up to. Perhaps they thought they’d been abandoned. Or worse, maybe they were all dead already.

One day, at the breakfast table, Mom hatched a plan. She was going to break into the high school and take her apple trees home. Yes, all three hundred of them. She needed our help and none of us had anything better to do so my family of five snuck down to the high school and smuggled out (in five trips) her three hundred apple trees. Her heist vehicle? A two-decade-old Toyota Camry. My dad could fit six apple trees on his lap at once, holding them close to him like a set of twiggy sextuplets. 

If you’re wondering, no we did not have space for three hundred apple trees in our 1100 square foot Boise home, but Mom did not care. The biodiversity of our local apple crop was at stake. Mom took care to remind us (frequently) of how beneficial these trees would be for our native bee populations and seed crops if we could manage to keep them alive. Plus, if the pandemic ended and Mom’s students got back to find their hard-grafted apple trees dead of dehydration, she’d be a pariah. 

Once the trees had all been successfully carted from the high school to my parents’ back patio, we were faced with another challenge: finding a place for all the trees. It was a dark, cold, slow Idaho springtime—not nearly warm enough for the trees to survive outside. They say you can tell when to put plants in the ground in Boise by when the snow is gone from Bogus Basin, our local ski hill, which is constantly visible from downtown. In 2020, the snow did not melt off until mid-May, so the trees had to stay in our house until (you guessed it) mid-May. 

There were baby apple trees everywhere. Trees in the bathroom. Trees in the basement. Trees lining the dining room table and filling leftover nooks and crannies of the kitchen. Some trees went into my dad’s music studio. Some trees wound up in the garage. Everywhere you turned there were apple trees, beautiful heritage apple trees. 

So, there we were, my whole family and Mom’s three hundred baby apple trees, all weathering COVID-19 together. 

Watering days were the worst. It became a full family mission, wandering the house with mason jars of water. All three hundred trees needed watering every other day. We’d slam our thumbs into the dirt to make sure there were at least three inches of damp soil. If not, the tree got a full cup of water and then it was back to the sink with us. Rinse and repeat. It took the whike family most of the morning to get all the trees watered. 

As the pandemic stretched on, the apple trees began to thrive. Not all of them survived the move. Some died slow and sad deaths. But some began to sprout leaves, a couple even blossomed, desperate little whispers “I’m alive, I’m alive!”

The little twigs that get grafted onto already existing apple trees are called scions. We have to use scions to grow apple trees because apples are very picky, finicky plants. Two seeds from the same apple will produce radically different plants. Maybe one makes sweet apples and the other makes the bitterest, most ugly looking fruit you’ve ever seen. The only way to instill consistency in apple orchards is grafting scions so the trees are genetically identical. Apple orchards are not collections of siblings, but rows of clones. It’s very sci-fi, if you think about it. 

One day in June, when I was particularly depressed, Mom broke down my bedroom door to tell me it was time to plant my apple tree. I’d been meticulously tending to a plastic black pot with a Brushy Mountain Limbertwig apple planted in it. The teenager who had grafted it had fused the scion sideways so the plant made a perfect ninety degree angle, one that would make any math teacher proud. The first section of stem grew straight as an arrow. The second section also grew straight as an arrow. It was just an arrow that ran perpendicular to the first stem. 

Somehow, despite its geometric anomalies, the plant had begun sprouting leaves, growing as best it could towards the sunshine. I had become obsessed with this plant. What a silly thing, I thought, an apple tree in the shape of a crossroad. When it was time to put the baby tree in the ground, even my depressed college kid self couldn’t muster an eye roll.

We started by digging a hole in the backyard where the swingset used to be. Into the hole went three cups of spent coffee grounds. Coffee grounds are high in nitrogen. Baby trees drink up nitrogen like elementary school humans drink up Sprite. Without enough nitrogen in their soil, plants struggle to create the chlorophyll they need to photosynthesize. Without the coffee grounds my poor baby apple tree was at risk of starving to death. I couldn’t have that.

As I planted the tree, still barely more than a twig with a few leaves sticking out in various directions, I felt like my childhood self was there with me. She was cheering us on, the apple tree and I. 

I grew up climbing trees in that yard. I’d grab on tight to the branches and pull myself up and up and up until my calluses bled. I’d raid squirrel nests in the catalpa tree every spring, poking my chubby blonde face in to see if there were any babies. There were never babies which was good because I was highly at risk of having my face scratched off by an angry mama squirrel. On days when my parents would fight, I’d hide in the silver maple in the front yard and count the creases in the blue gray bark. I had a perfect little sitting spot halfway up the trunk. I hid my My Little Ponies there when I didn’t want my baby brothers to chew on them.

My childhood dog, Bessie Bumper, is buried where the cherry tree used to be. All sixteen of my dead childhood goldfish had beautiful burials underneath the catalpa. Someday maybe the family cat will be laid to rest below my little Brushy Mountain Limbertwig, now barely bigger than a feather duster. 

Maybe my children will go play at their grandparents’ house and they’ll climb the apple tree I planted in the darkness of COVID-19. It’ll be taller than the house by then and, if I wait long enough to have children, it might even make fruit. 

Apple trees can take between eight and fifteen years to produce fruit regularly. This is one of the primary reasons farmers began cultivating apple crops using scion grafting rather than seeds. If you have to wait a decade to tell if a tree is going to make an edible fruit, you’re putting yourself in a bit of a pickle when the tree winds up making cider apples and not Red Delicious. 

I am inspired by the patience fruit farmers must exercise as they grow their orchards. After all, an orchard contains hundreds of trees taking cumulative centuries to mature. I imagine growing an orchard is a bit like being a mother. Certainly, the timeline is similar. Sprouts emerge from the soil and you water them, tend to them, and protect them over the winter. Once they’re big enough you begin grafting knowledge onto them, gifting them with new genetic code to help them create beautiful fruit. Twenty years later you will hopefully have a sweet Honeycrisp apple tree. Or you will have crab apples. It’s a roll of the dice. Still, even crab apples make cider. And I love cider. So maybe it’s not all lost. 

In the early days of the pandemic, I was (as most of us were) miserable. I sat for hours in Mom’s garden, staring at the trees. I would ponder endlessly the fact that trees live longer than humans. We put them in the ground as seedlings. They pop up out of the soil and measure no bigger than my pinky finger nail. But they grow. 

You blink and they’re taller than you. They blink and you’re an old woman. The wind twists a bit and you’re dead and buried and the tree is still there, standing, swaying in the rainy summer breeze.

The trees in my Mom’s backyard have remained standing through every one of my hardest moments. They have taken every thunderstorm, even the ones that had me hiding under the bed as a child, in stride. The bad days that nearly broke me didn’t phase the trees at all. But a bark beetle or a root fungus can kill an orchard in an instant. 

To be a tree is to be equally sturdy and fragile, equally cultivated and spontaneous, equally old and new. Boughs in Heaven, roots in Earth. 

A heritage tree is a tree that tells a story: a tree that could write a memoir if only it had the hands to hold a pencil. Often these trees stood through great historical moments. Helen Keller took her lessons beneath a Southern Magnolia, now her family property is littered with them. They blossom baby pink each March. Thoreau held church with the Red Maples at Walden. Maybe he listened to them sing in the wind. There is a Sweetgum tree still standing in Washington DC that stood watch over America as it severed and dissolved during the Civil War. It will watch as we sever and heal over and over again. It still drops its leaves every fall, as it always has and as it always will.

Anne Frank’s chestnut tree lived for one hundred and seventy years. I like to think it looked back at her as she watched it from the annex window. When it died its saplings were taken and replanted across the world. Now Anne Frank Trees stand in Boston, New York City, California and Arkansas. There is even an Anne Frank Tree in Boise, Idaho. My hometown. I rode my bike past that tree often when I’d take lonely rides along the river during the COVID lockdowns. I wonder if its bark will remember me as fondly as it remembers Anne.  

To be human is to leave things behind. We will leave behind our bodies when we die. Slowly and surely we will return to the soil and then we will nourish the crocus flowers that bloom each spring. Maybe a worm will eat my eyeballs when I die. Maybe that worm will feed a robin. Maybe that robin will make a nest in my apple tree. Maybe my grandchildren will climb high in the Limbertwig with their chubby hands, higher and higher until their calluses bleed. 

As mankind tumbles through history, bending and breaking and then decaying, trees will continue to stand and watch. So, let us leave behind Limbertwigs and Jonathan Apples and sugar plums the size of our thumbs. Those trees will remember COVID and whatever is yet to come in the layers of their bark. They will remember the coffee grounds we tucked gently in with their roots like bedtime stories. They will remember our hands climbing their branches, our noses pressed to their trunks—the most intimate kiss of all.