The bright side of a snowless winter is easy access to the apple trees when it’s time to prune. When I’m rinsing dishes at the sink, I have in my sight nine apple trees, and a tenth if I take a few steps and look out a window to the West; and because they are so close to the house, I prune them with a lover’s care.
These are wild apple trees with unremarkable fruit, but not far away I have planted nursery trees of apple, pear and cherry that each year provide plenty of edible fruit. They are smaller and less interesting to the eye with their uncomplicated shapes, and easy to prune. The wild apples are another matter. Some years the snow is so deep around them that I have difficulty maneuvering my ladder. The cuttings drop to the ground and look like shadows on the snow, and some years I don’t get around to hauling them away until May when they are snared by the grass.
This year I got an early start and worked on a few trees I had neglected for years and allowed to grow skyward with shafts so thick and weighty they could split the tree in a storm. Removal was challenging, and sometimes I had to step from the ladder onto a trembling branch with a chainsaw to make a cut and then wrestle the sections to the ground through a tangle of branches. Pruning is hard, physical work, easy to quit in frustration, and whenever I step back from a tree thinking I am done, I always see something I have missed.
Recently, I heard a tree expert say he knows three reasons to prune a tree — for health, for production, and for aesthetics — and that once you have addressed the health of the tree, it’s your choice which of the other two to prefer. I liked what he said because it seemed to rationalize what I have been intuitively doing for many years. We eat fruit from the trees I have planted, and in a good summer, we have more than we need. Sometimes we cook up wild apples into sauce, but mostly they fall to the ground and feed deer throughout the winter. I prune these trees for shape and for clearance, and in May when they bloom, the sight is a glory. At the end of summer when they sag with the weight of their brilliant fruit, I feel like I’ve played a part.
The truth is that they are an accident of nature. I noticed them 40 years ago when I was clearing the hillside to build a house, and I left them standing as I removed poplars, pines and thorn apples. When I had finished, the serpentine row of wild apples looked so orderly that I asked the farmer who once had owned the land if his father had tried to start an orchard. “No,” he said, “ they grow that way on their own.”
In a strange turn, the news this spring has been of an entrepreneur from Utah, who is buying up land in Sharon, Royalton, Tunbridge, and Strafford for a utopian community of 20,000 near the birthplace of Joseph Smith. It sounds hair-brained and improbable, this concept he calls New Vista, and he tries to calm his critics by saying it will not be complete within his lifetime. Nor mine. Who is to say what the world will look like a century from now, but what troubles me are the old homesteads and apple trees he has already snapped up and the utter disconnect of his plan from the nature of the land. If I sound sentimental, I don’t mean to be. I understand the march of time and know that the history of this land has been one of change over the past three centuries, from deep forests to cleared hillsides, from sheep farming to dairy, and now to something else still being determined. I understand why people will sell their land for a good price.
The triad of health, fruitfulnes, and aesthetics that the forester spoke of is now lodged in my brain and makes a modern city in this corner of Vermont sound utterly wrong. It’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, at least not here. Why not Detroit or Gary, cities that have outlived their time and need a new vision? I’m not alone. The opposition is mounting and seems calm and reasoned in contrast to the hostility that drove the Mormons west two centuries ago. I think of my apple trees and the way they make me feel when I try to picture the lives of people in the utopia he plans. For a decade my daughter lived with her family in Manhattan on the 10th floor of a building of a thousand residents, and I’m trying to imagine 20 of these or their equivalent plunked down in a state where people don’t want windmills spoiling their ridgelines. In the world he envisions, what will happen to the apple trees?
I’m smart enough to know the world is passing me by. One day when I was feeling good about the progress I had made pruning a tree, my wife reminded me of a friend who told us her father fell from a treetop a few years ago and broke “most of his bones on the way down.” He survived, but he needed two years to mend.
As a boy, I cared little for the aesthetics of apple trees. They were for climbing and their fruit for throwing at my friends in the apple wars of our childhood. Last fall when the apples were abundant, I picked one from a tree and tossed it casually in the direction of my grandsons, and soon they were raking handfuls to return fire. It’s possible that when they are grown, they will choose to live in skyscrapers, but for now I’ll imagine them in their own houses, looking through kitchen windows at rows of apple trees.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford. He can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.