biologicalenrichment

Here nestled into the leaf litter of a farm road I drive over, a small apple tree has sprouted and taken root. This apple tree might be considered an accidental visitor or a plant out of place for some but for me it’s a revelation filled with latent possibilities. I started saving these so called “out of place trees almost all of which came from parent trees at my farm. I saved seedlings from my neighbors landscaping too. Being in the middle of the road has its disadvantages so I will likely move it to the side. I like plants not in rows. It’s a forest with precision planting skills of birds, squirrels and other small mammals. Even the deer play a role with their perfectly designed hoofs.

As I discover more and more seedlings I soon realize the tree farm is planting itself into the future. As I carefully prune back other trees, limb them upwards and cut back to the ground other plants I soon have my three story agriculture. I am guiding it to a more edible future by giving light to these seedling plants and getting them outside of the browse line of deer. It is never native versus exotic. There are no invasive plant species. That is entirely a fabrication to begin with. One plant helps the other while I quietly participate in this ever widening and diverse world we live in today. The plants are truly a reflection of all cultures. The values become:

• Restorative

• Regenerative

• Integrative

If you dare to look into the taxonomy of pears, you will find some treasures hidden in the mountains in France far outside cultivation. These are not “escaped” pears but subspecies that someone in taxonomy has gone to the trouble to identify and catalog. They exist on paper as a single line of text but not found in cultivation.

I received seed of a few populations from a forester that sent me not only the seed but a print out from those journals not found on the internet. Here is one of those species: Pyrus communis subspecies balansae. It is thought to be the origin of the pear we eat today.

Surprisingly it’s not edible and is highly astringent. The squirrels love it and dive into the seeds in July. How a human found or created an edible fruit from this subspecies over time seems impossible. But it did happen.

These vigorous trees were hammered by deer and shaped by drought and fire blight before settling down to a few trees on a steep slope with shallow top soil at my farm. Over time I became kind of enamored with their growth on this site with extremely shallow soil and a lot of rocks.

I can enjoy the fragrance and beauty of the flowers. Possibly the wood quality is perfect for making musical instruments like the wooden pear recorder I have. Maybe I can find a way to harness the nutrients in the fruit while dreaming of the pear we have today and how we got from balansae to the pear we eat. That must of been quite a culinary journey. In the meantime, my balansae is balanced as a small population on a hillside started in the middle of a field where nothing grew before. That is a pear.

This particular species of broadleaf evergreen is part of a broad range of species as well as hybrids used as ornamental landscape plants. One of my ‘seedy’ friends sent me several types of seeds harvested from older arboretum collections. I love the flavor of the grape flavored fruit. It’s intense. One small fruit fills your mouth. Winter was a bit rough on the foliage on many of them but eventually I ended up with two good colonies of Dwarf Grape Holly and possibly a hybrid of it with a strong trunk and strong lateral branching. My thought is since it is related to Berberis it might contain loads of anthocyanins and be vitamin rich. In full flower, it is beautiful.

Tall robust selection.

Each of these types provides a window into a new crop with potential as an understory fruiting plant into zone 5. It is not a common ornamental anymore and deserves a wider audience as a fruit bearing plant. Selections can be rooted easily. Even the species can be grown without breeding. I once saw a fantastic fruiting type on a college campus in central Michigan. It was protected from wind from a large building. The fruit quantity was the most I have ever seen on a single shrub. Often these individual plants vary in production so heavier fruiting selections can easily be grown, selected and propagated from rooted cuttings. The soil does not have to be that acidic. Mine are growing in a ph of 6 and mulched with wood chips every three years. They do produce some stolons and these can be used to create a more robust planting or for propagation.

It was only by accident that I found an American chestnut tree one summer while doing yard work for a little extra money in my senior year in college.  The dried burrs I found beneath it made a great ornament on my desk. “Look but do not touch” it said.  I read as much as I could find about the tree. Yet the history of the tree and its dilemma with disease were of little concern to me.  I thought I  was just lucky to find a single tree because Michigan is not its home base. It wasn’t even mentioned in my botany courses.

When I started my nursery a few years later, I found out that a number of nut growers had produced hybrid progeny that would at least repel the dreaded blight. Some said immune, some said resistant and others said good luck.  Being young and stupid has its advantages as once again, I ignored the warnings  and went ahead with my plans. With check book in hand, I purchased as much seed as I could buy. Prior to ye ole internetti, I made a lot of phone calls and letters. Eventually I set out numerous seedlings on my farm and sold many thousands of hybrid chestnuts in my nursery. Within 6 years my orchard was bearing and I began enjoying my own seed source. This was encouraging and reinforced my go it alone approach.  Oh the nuts were delicious. The trees were magnificent. Some of the trees grew 6 ft. in a single year. Others had 8 nuts per burr with some young trees producing in 2 years from seed.   It was somewhere around the  15th year that chestnut blight finally ended up in my orchard. It was not pretty. My guess was that it probably blew in from a tree far away. I had never brought in seedlings, scions or wood of any type to risk infection. One afternoon while cutting some trees down someone came up to me and said, “Aren’t you sad you had to loose these trees after all those years?”  Well..not really. There certainly was a loss but the gain for me and my planting far overshadows this. A  plant world without disease, insects or any powerful force of nature would be a world without progress or change.  To overcome these obstacles, you have to start with the seed and preferably from the seed of the most recent generation. The simple act of planting a seed can only give this result time after time. Going to grafting or cultivar selection only arrests that process.  Thank goodness I did not have a grafted hybrid orchard as all the trees would have perished. Now that I appear to be a little wiser (the verdict is still out),  I am replanting with a greater diversity than I did before plus using the many naturally regenerated seedlings that grow around my parent plants that have no blight and leaving them in a greater density than before.  Anticipation is a joyous state of mind.

As I look over that beautiful lumber, I am not thinking death but rebirth as to what new life I can bring to this wood. A table, guitar or a chest of drawers made from the trees I grew on a whim given to family members would be a way to say thank you to the trees that constantly give life even after death.  Nothing is lost.

Farmerless fields can create sustainable forests of specialty woods using only a small portion of land by focusing on soils that fit perfectly with the tree crop. It doesn’t have to be all or none or create a strain to the landowner. The chestnut is a good example.