Mom mentioned some childhood neighbors in a blog comment yesterday that got me thinking about Mrs. Ruth. She lived next door when I was very young. I have only a few memories of her, really: She had a cat, she was a German immigrant and tended to mutter to herself in low German when I was around, she kept candy orange slices in the bottom crisper drawer of her fridge and she had three cherry trees east of her garage.
I remember more than that about Mrs. Ruth but the cherry trees are etched into my mind forever. In fact, I checked Google maps and it looks like the trees are still there. As a kid I would take a break from my sandbox and climb into the mulberry tree in our back yard for a snack and I would tend to stare in the direction of the cherry trees wondering why there were always mulberries but almost never cherries. But on those rare few days when they were ripe we would all help Mrs. Ruth pick cherries.
Buckets of cherries. Cherries in the freezer. Cherries in jellies. Cherry pies. Cherries cooked into a sauce with sugar and poured over ice cream. I don’t even know what else.
And you can’t overlook the reliable mulberry tree in that story.
Mulberries. Julie and her brothers didn’t have much experience with mulberries when I met them. Julie and I would walk through the pasture together at her parent’s house (definitely not a date, right?) and eat and talk (cause we are just friends, right?) and hold hands (friends can hold hands, right?). Mulberries were a staple food. They are not too sweet and tend to be a little stemmy but don’t have the pesky seeds of a dewberry or black raspberry. We would pick a few berries in the summer evening, our hands would be stained purple just like in the picture I shared a few years back of picking mulberries while putting up hay…because we always stop to rest in the shade under the mulberry trees in the bottom.
Not all mulberry trees are created equal, btw. Some are more sweet than others and some don’t fruit at all. And having written “btw” I am reminded that mulberries have a good BTU rating (above oaks) and coppice well. And the leaves are a good source of protein for cattle. So these are trees I work to keep around. Although, you don’t have to work too hard as mulberries tend to grow wherever there are birds.
But cherry trees are a different story altogether. There are wild black cherry trees all over our farm. We have picked buckets of these too but the fruit tends to be bitter and thin around the stone. Apparently it makes a good cordial. But a sweet or sour domesticated cherry tree is a real treasure.
My friend Yoichiro came to visit us in 2013. He and I planted a cherry tree together. I think of him every time I look at that tree. I am still happy we shared that experience.
I got the sapling from my friend Steve. They are a small, short-lived sour cherry and they replace themselves readily. He digs up a dozen or so saplings every year. The original sapling came from an abandoned farmstead. He dug it up at some point in the last 20 or 30 years. Here is a picture of it several years ago.
Let’s review. decades ago, Steve and his wife spent an afternoon driving through the countryside looking for heirloom varieties in the yards of abandoned farm houses. Among other things, Steve found a cherry tree that he brought home, planted, cared for and propagated. Doesn’t that sound nice?
Years later we were invited to pick cherries and asked if he could spare a sapling we noticed coming up under the canopy. Early the next spring Steve loaded us up with a trunk full of food, rhubarb plants and a small cherry sapling.
A friend from Japan came to visit in 2013. Together we planted the cherry sapling above promising to meet again someday and enjoy the fruit together. Then my kids and I planted daffodils and comfrey around it.
Steve came by later, inspected the planting and took home some comfrey and some bamboo from my yard.
Do you see how that little cherry tree is intertwined in our relationships? …in our community?
Life changing magic.
I wrote about my grandpa Jordan recently. Last summer my kids and I spent a hot afternoon picking peaches from his peach tree. They were not spectacular peaches…kind of small and spotty. But he planted a tree, did a little maintenance on it and we all ate all we wanted and my kids have a fun memory of standing on great-grandpa Jordan’s cannon while picking peaches…just days before our youngest was diagnosed with cancer.
What is the value of that peach tree? Or grandpa’s grape vines he made homemade wine from?
I have shared about my friend Eileen, her Mutsu apples and chestnut trees. This year we came home with a trash can of waste apples and a big, big box of chestnuts. The pigs made pigs of themselves.
And it seems obvious to remember Aunt Marian’s apple trees. I have written this before but I would race to prune her trees as fast as I could, doing a portion of each tree each year, because she would catch me pruning and would run me off. But I had her Mutsu in good shape by making a few “accidental” cuts here and there to slowly get the tree in shape. And I got all the apples I could use. And so did the pigs. And aunt Marian had all kinds of stories about each tree in her orchard and where they came from.
I’m sure there are other things you can do to build inter-generational memories but trees put down roots. There is a giant burr oak tree in my pasture that my grandpa Chism said was always big. Roots. Ties to previous generations.
What is that worth?
Where are you planting your trees? You don’t need a farm. You just have to stay put for a while.
Chism Heritage Farm 
This shows how intertwined our lives are on the simplest of terms, you don’t know about Myron Nixon grafting better wood on walnut trees around the farm ( the trees behind the garage but most of the trees below the cemetery have grafts, have any survived? ).
Nick told me once to plant trees even if I wasn’t planning to live there until maturity because you can’t have fruit until you plant a tree.
I wonder if Ruth Renne knew what fruit her “plantings” would bear.
I have planted tree after tree here on our property in Montana. We bought a house with acreage in 2010. The house is very well built efficient to heat and cool and lovely. The first family divorced two years after having the house built. The second family sold it because they were in businesses that suffered during the economic downturn. Not a single fruit or nut tree was planted during those first 8 years.
We are planting carefully selected apples, peaches, plums, pears, and cherries. Voles and gophers have taken some, deer love to nibble them and dry years have been challenging. But we are beginning to really see the fruits of our labor. Our last child has left the nest, we’ll soon be welcoming neighbors to share in the bounty to come.
Growing up in the South as a pastor’s daughter we moved every seven years or so. When we would visit my Grandmother and her sister I would enjoy her Jujubes and figs. There were magical jars of whole fig preserves with lemon slices in her big pantry. One house (we called our temporary homes pastoriums) had a wonderful apple tree that resulted in lots of busy kitchen activities. One house had woods on two sides and tasty blackberries. It was hard to get enough for a pie when we were eating so many as we picked. My mother, who grew up in Denver, use to talk about a childhood neighbor’s gooseberry bush. So now we have about eight varieties of gooseberries and 10 black currant bushes all loaded with fruit in early summers. Rhubarb that didn’t like our warm climates now flourishes in the beds bordering the back of the house.
The coming of Spring fills me (more than ever) with joyful anticipation of the growing season. The budding, blooming, and fruit set all get my attention. While peas and greens are planted the fruit trees are doing what they do every year they are beautiful in bloom, will someday provide shade, and and this year they will surely provide fruit for fresh eating, pies and canning. Not a lot but promising for years to come.