Johnny Appleseed Doesn't Live Here Anymore

 

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about fruit trees.  The untangling of belongings in the loft has left some gaping holes around the place.  I began to think how wonderful to take advantage of so much sunlight and what it might be like to have a fruit tree to fill out the odd little corner in front of one of the 12 foot windows.  I imagined sweet smelling blossoms and pungent zest for cooking.  I'm not quite sure how this idea came into my head, but there it stuck.  I googled miniature fruit trees and the best fruit trees to grow in pots.  I began to dream of marmalade and fruit salads....   

 

We aren't allowed to plant trees in our tiny plots at the garden, but there are plenty of them in the common areas and come Spring and Summer there is an abundance of fruit to share: peaches, apples, pomegranates, plums etc  But, still, something about waking up to the smell of, say, orange blossoms filling the loft moved me.  Just about then, Fern over at Life on the Balcony posted about fruit trees.  It was a really instructive post about how, really, you can't grow fruit trees from seed.  It's complicated and, well, you should be reading Fern's blog anyway, so head over there and learn.  Like a good gardening student, I asked her about container fruit trees.  And she wrote back the most obvious of obvious answers:  you can't grow a fruit tree indoors and still get fruit.  You need pollination to get fruit.  You need bees to get fruit. 

In other words:  You can't bear fruit alone.   

And by fruit I mean just about anything you want to accomplish.  Ideas, support, incentives, praise, constructive criticism - these are all things that go into pollinating our own versions of fruit.  We require to be sparked and supported by those around us.  They pollinate us.  Even the most solitary of artists must eventually have an audience.  And if I'd thought for just one second about this instead of having sugar plums dancing in my head, I would have realized that. 

You can't bear fruit in a vacuum.   

You can't bear fruit without pollination.  (Too much, too painful to consider)

You can't bear fruit without other fruit trees.  

So... with the facts in front of me,  I must consider that isolating myself with my little unpollinated tree would not be, well, fruitful for me - as safe as it might feel in the wake of the recent storm.

Long Beach Is My Garden

This morning, in order to follow through on "believing the impossible" of yesterday's post and to earn the silver medallion my friends Anne and Kirk gave me as a result of said post, I got up early and rode my bike along the LA River to a SoCal Guerrilla Gardening spot under the Anaheim Bridge.  Scott Bunnell who IS SoCal Guerrilla Gardening arranges legal and illegal plantings ala Raves in abandoned bits of dirt all over Long Beach.   So, along with 15 or so folks and a film crew (figures he would be getting filmed for a travel show this particular day), we took his lovingly propagated natives and turned this into that:

As one of the volunteers, George, said:  "I live in an apartment and don't have a garden, so why not do this.  Then Long Beach is my garden".  I just loved that!  The volunteers were old and young, gardeners and not, apartment dwellers and house dwellers and veterans to SoCal Guerrilla along with total newbies like me.

I think one of the unexpected gifts of my garden has been the circle of fellowship around gardening and greening.  I've got a web of cyber-blog people I rely on for advice and encouragement and some have even become friends in the flesh like Adriana of Anarchy In The Garden.  I did what I do best and had pimped her to the film crew before she even got there... She gives good interview. 

Today's guerrilla planting was another step in my adventures in gardening.  It reaffirmed for me that I can and will find community because of my garden.  Scott gave aloe vera to anyone who wanted some.  And as I set out for the bicycle path again, I passed this scooter and smiled at the adventure this particular plant was about to go on:

What if a peach tree could grow bananas?

Today I checked on the garden after a week straight of rain, wind, and flooding.  It was like falling down the Rabbit Hole.   Everything was larger, stranger, upside down.  But, it felt sort of good.   Today, maybe, I should dream the impossible.

Rain, Rain Go Away....

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain...  

                                   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's been pouring rain for days in Long Beach.  There has been flooding, destruction, a tornado and, most strangely of all, surfing on our shores.  You can't actually surf in the still waters of Long Beach, so that should tell you something.

The rain has fit my mood.  It started raining when my Squeeze moved out and it hasn't stopped since.  At least I think its rain on the windows and not just the view from my own eyes.  

At first I was grateful for it.   My garden had been neglected by me lately and I couldn't really remember the last time I'd watered it.  I've been busy rearranging a life, but still...  Maybe I'd neglected it in part because of frustration that nothing seemed to be growing except three broad bean plants, some lettuce varieties, and a few volunteer sunflowers or maybe because I'm just not sure what will become of me, the garden, and Long Beach.  Maybe I was pulling away from it so it won't hurt so much.

Nonetheless, as this wave of relentless rain and wind continued to batter us, I began to worry about what I did have growing there...  Would it hold up against the storm?  Would I lose the small stronghold I had in the garden?  Would it drown and destroy whatever seeds remained dormant underground?

During a brief moment of strange and hopeful sunlight, I ran over to the garden to see what the damage was....  Sure enough, my broad beans were a tangled mess on the ground and my sunflowers were flattened over.   I related.  It's much how I'm feeling in this storm of my own.

I cut some lettuce, pulled the broad beans tall against the string guides quietly wishing them to stay, and then I thanked the sunflowers for their service - truthfully, they have no business growing this time of year.     

And now I'm left wondering, as the news tells me that this storm will only get stronger and fiercer:  Will the garden be able to pick itself up again?  Will my plants be strong enough to ever stand tall again?  Or will this particular storm have simply been too much for me and the garden to weather?