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.