The Ghost Orchard

by Helen Humphreys

  The poet may die, but the poetry continues.

  THE GHOST ORCHARD

  In a Canadian nursery catalogue from 1827, there are seventy-nine varieties of apple trees available to be ordered, bought and planted.1 Some of the varieties are familiar to us today—Snow, Russet, Rhode Island Greening—but many are apples that I have never tasted and never even seen. Some have appealingly descriptive names (Monstrous Pippin, Mammoth Apple, Winter Blush), and some names seem to have changed—an apple called Yellow Harvest in the catalogue appears to exactly match one we now call the Yellow Transparent.

  The local aspect of the apples is highlighted. The catalogue is not a scientific document, but rather the transcription of a conversation between apple growers and apple sellers. Three of the varieties in the catalogue—Large Fair Soft & White, Large Green Streaked and Large Green Sweet—were named by the author, with an explanatory note to say that the apples “are very fine fruits from Mr. Cooper’s famous Orchard, not having the proper names at present I have given this description.”2

  The apples are listed in the catalogue first by number, for easy reference, then by name, and then by the time of year at which they ripen. They range from early to very late keepers—the Tewksbury Winter Blush is described as keeping from October right through June, for example. The Pennock’s Large Red Winter ripens in November and then keeps straight through to April. The number each apple is given corresponds to the time at which it ripens (the early numbers signify early ripening apples and so forth). The White Winter Pearmain is fiftieth out of the seventy-nine listed apples, roughly two-thirds of the way through, meaning that in 1827 it was considered an early winter apple. Three of the later apples—the Green Everlasting, Red Everlasting and Millar’s Long Keeping—are said to remain edible for a full year.3

  If you wanted to eat and cook apples right through a calendar year in 1827, you needed to be able to grow those apples yourself (or buy them locally). Fruit did not readily cross borders, as it does today, and it wasn’t available out of season. An orchard in the early nineteenth century was not often a large enterprise, but it was a comprehensive one, in that it produced ripe apples from July through November. And the apples that were ripe in November, the winter apples, could be stored until spring or summer.

  The orchard at Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s former house (now a museum) in Kingston is a good example of a nineteenth-century home orchard. Bellevue House was originally constructed around 1840 for a wealthy Kingston merchant. The Macdonalds rented it from him in 1848–49, a sorrowful year that included the death of their young son, John Alexander Jr., when he was just a year old.

  Bellevue House was designed and built in the Italianate style.4 This meant that there were two wings extending from a central tower in an L-shape, and that there were different sizes and shapes to the windows, a mix of peaked and flat roofs, and numerous small balconies. The house has just three floors, but there are seven levels.

  The Italianate style is a picturesque design, and this design extends to the gardens. A picturesque design is that heady mix of order and chaos—the contained grandeur of the house juxtaposed with a wild apple orchard full of long grass and with no regularity to the placement of the trees. It was meant as a status symbol. The orchard shielded the house from the road and gave the appearance of country living in the city.

  The original orchard at Bellevue is long gone, and a replacement orchard was planted on the site in the 1980s. The varieties of trees in the original orchard have been lost to the historical record, but those that have been replanted are trees that were popular at the time, and so the chance is good that there has been overlap between the two orchards. Also, while Bellevue House is a good deal grander than most middle-class Canadian homes of the period, many of those home orchards would have included some of the same trees.

  The apple trees in the modern-day Bellevue House orchard are as follows:

  Baldwin: The Baldwin has an interesting nomenclature. It was first discovered on a farm in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1740. This farm was purchased by a Mr. Butters, who decided to call the apple the Woodpecker because it was favoured by those birds. Over time, its name was shortened to the Pecker, and eventually people started calling it the Butters. The current name comes via a Colonel Baldwin, who cultivated the apple more widely and ushered in its long and prosperous commercial life. By the mid-1800s, it was a very popular apple in New England, New York and Southern Ontario. A large green-red apple with juicy yellow flesh, it ripens late, will keep right through winter, and gives reliable and generous yields.

  Blood Gravenstein: This is a strain of the Gravenstein, an apple that was grown in Holland in the seventeenth century but most likely originated in Germany or Russia. It is a highly blushed, yellow-skinned apple with short, broad broken scarlet stripes. It ripens in early September and does well with cool summers, making it a popular growing apple in Nova Scotia and California. It’s a good eating and cooking apple, with crisp and juicy white flesh.

  Early Harvest: This apple has been mistakenly identified at Bellevue as the Summer Harvest, a variety that does not exist. The Early Harvest most likely originated in Canada in the 1700s; it ripens, as the name suggests, in July and August. Pale yellow, it has an orange blush on one side and juicy white flesh. It is used for fresh eating and for pies and sauce.

  Golden Russet: Both a cider and an eating apple, with a sharp, crisp taste, the Golden Russet was propagated in the United States in the early to middle nineteenth century and would have been a fairly new apple for the original Macdonald orchard. The Golden Russet is also a good cooking apple. It is frequently confused with the English Russet, but they are different varieties (although the former probably derived as a seedling apple from the latter).

  Maiden Blush: This is an early nineteenth-century American apple with pale yellow skin and a dark red blush on one side. It ripens at the beginning of September. The flesh is white, and that whiteness remains even when the apple is dried. A member of the Pennsylvania Fruit Growers’ Society in the late 1800s learned that he could preserve Maiden Blush apples well into January by placing them in a basket and suspending it in a well, two feet above the water. It was an early method of apple storage that predated the root cellar and produced fruit as firm and blemish-free as the day they were picked from the tree.5

  Northern Spy: This large red apple is renowned for being both one of the best winter apples and one of the tastiest pie apples. It ripens into November and keeps its shape and crispness all through the winter.

  Pumpkin Sweet: Also known as the Pound Sweet, this is a large apple with yellowish-green skin that is often covered with a brown flush. Historically, it was used for baking, making apple butter and feeding to livestock. It ripens in September and has yellow flesh with an overly sweet taste.

  Red Astrachan: This is one of the apple varieties Robert Frost planted. Not a good keeper, it is best cooked and is said to make the tastiest jelly of all the apples. It is a medium apple and yellow in colour, with streaks sometimes so numerous that it can appear to be solid red. It has Russian origins.

  St. Lawrence: A distinctly Canadian variety that was discovered in Montreal in 1835, the St. Lawrence is a small green apple with red stripes; it’s good for fresh eating and for making applesauce. It ripens in mid-September, but it doesn’t usually last more than a month in storage.

  Tolman Sweet: This was a popular tree for home orchards. The sweet yellow apple kept through winter and was good for pickling, baking, cider, drying and eating fresh. It was grown a lot in Canada and New York, and had a reputation for being hardy and a reliable producer.

  Westfield Seek No Further: A medium apple from Westfield, Connecticut, it had creamy yellow skin and red stripes. It was used only as a dessert apple, which made it a bit limited, but it was also hardy and a good producer, so it was popular in the mid-nineteenth century in Ontario, New York and the American Midwest.

  Winesap: This is a fairly small but uniform red apple that was on
ce extremely popular in North America as a market apple because of its appealing taste, and because it was a good keeper. It could last almost through the winter in regular storage and right through the spring in cold storage.

  Worcester Pearmain: An English apple that was popular there in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a medium red apple with a distinctive strawberry flavour. Both the apples and the blossoms were thought to be particularly attractive. It ripened in mid-September and was best eaten fresh.

  The orchard at Bellevue House still functions as it did when it was planted in the 1840s. From the road, the house is completely hidden by the apple trees—even when visitors stand right up against the fence bordering the property. It seems to me that the apparently random pattern of the trees is not really random at all, but that each tree is there to plug a hole in the view and to provide passersby with a dense screen of green foliage to look at if they’re trying to spy on the house. The orchard is much superior to a hedge because the staggering of the trees produces a layered effect, and unlike a hedge, the scrim of green can’t simply be peered over.

  Part of the appeal of the picturesque design is the unkempt “wild” appearance of the orchard, and this is maintained at Bellevue. To further the authenticity of the period, the orchard is mowed by scythe when the grass becomes too long. When I visited, the staff person on duty that day warned me about snakes—attracted, no doubt, by the tall grass, which would also be home to mice, voles, chipmunks and other animals that would enjoy feeding on the apples when they were ripe. An orchard is also very attractive to birds because of the proliferation of insects that are interested in the fruit. Like most homogenous plant groupings, orchards have their own ecosystems.

  It would be remiss of me not to mention Henry David Thoreau in this book about apples, partly because of his own treatise on apple trees, but mostly because of his passion for them. I have felt a kinship with him as I tromp around this fall, eating the wild apples I discover in the fields beyond the city limits. I like his romantic declarations that wild apples should be eaten out of doors, that the conditions in which they thrive—wind and sun and rain—are also the conditions in which they should be consumed. Now we would call this “terroir,” but in his day there was no name for it, just an enthusiasm: “These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,—that is, out-of-doors.”6

  Thoreau also believed that one’s thoughts were different outside than they were indoors, and that apples eaten outdoors tasted far superior to those that were consumed inside. One hundred and fifty-four years later, it is hard to disagree with him. There is something truly liberating about striding around the countryside (even though there is much less of it in my day than there was in his), tasting apples off different trees, throwing away the ones I don’t like and knowing they will be eaten by voles and insects, that nothing will go to waste.

  “All apples are good in November,”7 declared Thoreau, and again, it’s hard to find fault with that statement. An apple in November is right on the edge of winter, and the sweetness it contains seems the last little burst of summer in your mouth.

  I have come to think of apple trees as akin to human beings, not just in the fact of their individuality, and their diversity, but also in the brief tenure of their lives. A hundred years is very old for an apple tree, as it is for a person. An apple tree exists for the same length of time that we do, and this gives our relationship with the trees certain poignancy.

  To stand under an apple tree in May is to feel its life as the branches vibrate with the industry of bees visiting the blossoms. The noise of the bees and the rich, sweet scent of the blossoms is an intoxicating combination, and I feel, pausing at the base of the tree and looking up into the branches, that I am in the presence of the divine. The overlapping hum of the bees is almost choral, and it’s in G, which is the key of the Goldberg Variations and was called, in the baroque period, “the key of benediction.”8

  An apple tree in September or October is equally alive, full of birds and squirrels and insects, all intent on feeding from the ripened fruit, hanging with such poise from the upturned branches. In the fall I went “scrumping” for apples in the fields and woods around the small town where I live. (“Scrumping” is a nineteenth-century term, meaning to take the windfalls or the apples that remain on a tree after the harvest. Its meaning has been extended to include the act of stealing apples from someone else’s orchard.)9 I stayed within walking distance of town, to see what varieties still remained on the “wild” apple trees that decorated hill and heath.

  I sometimes went with a friend, and I always took the dog, who enjoyed hunting mice and voles in the long grass at the base of the apple trees. I tried to stop her—not from hunting but from killing—but I was only moderately successful in this as I was often preoccupied with plucking a choice apple from high in the branches with my apple-picking “tool,” which strongly resembled a lacrosse stick.

  I was able to find, identify and eat—all within walking distance of my house—the following varieties of apples: Yellow Transparent, Baldwin, St. Lawrence, Jersey Mac, Winesap, Red Delicious, Snow, Gravenstein, Reinette. The Reinette was my favourite of these, and the best tasting. It also had one of the longest seasons. I was eating apples from that tree on December 5, and at the end of January I still had several in my fridge that remained edible.

  All these trees were once part of orchards or kitchen gardens that have long since disappeared. Probably they survived because people were reluctant to cut them down—the trees were “useful,” in that they produced food. Now they exist in little strips of wilderness between the suburbs and the city, dropping a mantle of colour onto the dry grass in the fall; they provide food for birds and mice, foxes and the odd deer that ranges through the margin of field between the fences. The apple trees, like the animals, are a reminder that the landscape was once different, with different priorities in play.

  My friend died. Then, unexpectedly, my father died. All fall I walked from tree to tree, often at sunset, collecting and eating apples while the sky blazed orange or pink above the water and I thought about their deaths. Sometimes, on the way back to the car with a bag of apples in one hand and the apple-picker resting on my shoulder, I would turn to call for the dog, who was nosing in the shadows, and I would see the trees behind me, the apples glowing with the last of the sun, like lanterns on the crest of the hill.

  My father had always liked trees. His father, who died in the Second World War, had wanted to move from England to Traill, BC, to start a fruit farm. My father planted a peach tree once, buying it from the nursery across the road from his house and tending it carefully through several seasons. He was excited when it bore fruit, and saddened when it succumbed to disease and eventually perished.

  My father wasn’t religious. He believed that we are all energy, and that our energy, when we die, is absorbed by other energies. He hoped that when he died, he would become part of a tree.

  My friend Joanne, in her last days, said, “I will always be there.” Meaning that to bring her back for myself, I just had to think of her. She would always be there for me. She would just stop being there for herself. And this is true and not true—the absence recalling the presence—like the apple trees on the hill, a reminder of what once was and yet persisting, still existing on their own.

  Memory becomes its own ghost orchard.

  There should be a word for how the dead continue and don’t continue, for how the fact of them gives over to the thought of them.

  Even love. Even rain. The fox crossing the leafy avenue. Darkness lifting from the field. The wet ring on the table under the beer glass. The scent of lilacs on the hill. Even laughter. Even breath won’t remember you.

  Nevertheless, you are still there. In the line of morning song outside the window. The dark plum of dusk. The
dream. In the scatter of words on a page. The rise of green before the wild orchard.

  In the taste of this apple.

  The IMAGINED DISCOVERY of the WHITE WINTER PEARMAIN

  The White Winter Pearmain, whose history I have been loosely tracing in this book, had its origins in thirteenth-century Britain. All accounts say that the apple was simply “discovered,” with no explanation given as to how and by whom. The fact of the apple remained the important thing, not the story surrounding its birth—especially as that story would have had to endure for hundreds of years.

  It could have been a farmer who originally found the apple. Or a traveller. Or quite possibly an animal in the company of a human. It was most likely a fairly ordinary discovery and perhaps not much was made of it. The world was much newer then. There were many discoveries. But because I have been thinking hard about the White Winter Pearmain for well over two years now, and because I want to fill in the history of this apple, to leave this account complete, I am giving you the following story as a possibility of how it could have been discovered. What follows is fiction, not fact. Not that it did happen this way, but that it could have happened this way.

  I hope you will consider the story a windfall.

  ENGLAND, AD 1200

  Sir Godfrey was riding through the countryside, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face and the backs of his hands where they held the horse’s reins. He could even feel the heat of the sun warming the metal and penetrating the tiny holes in the chain mail covering his head.