Orchard Dragons

In September 1979, I arrived in Kyoto, Japan, to begin a Fellowship year studying the Noh Theater right after graduating college. Wanting to discover the city and its treasures, I would go off walking each day. Finding myself in front of an important looking temple, I walked in and was quickly herded into a large group of Japanese tourists. Led by a white-gloved professional guide, our pod pushed through a narrow opening into a cavernous room. The guide started talking, while gesturing toward the ceiling. I didn’t know a word of Japanese and had no idea what she was saying. There were ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ and ‘ah sos’, but I was baffled.

Straining their necks, everyone was feasting on the ceiling. Swirls of black and white brush strokes covered the dome. It looked like some cosmic orgy of clouds, the Milky Way galaxy with nebulae and star clusters. But thinking was getting me nowhere; I couldn’t make sense of the painting.  I felt ridiculous standing there not understanding. The guide would point to one corner and then another, as the group turned in unison to follow her finger. I turned and looked, too, but saw nothing.  

Tennryu-ji Temple Ceiling Painting

Then, to my astonishment, a claw appeared, a gnarled dragon’s claw. I followed it back to the powerful leg, the writhing body, the daggered tail, the long-whiskered head. The dragon represents primordial energy and the balance of darkness and light, absence and presence, yin and yang.

 My friend, Judith Schutzman, took a photo on New Year’s Day of a few trees in the orchard. A week later she returned with a gift, a painting she had made from her photograph. It took me a few seconds, what was this painting of?  Then it was clear, it was the orchard. The apple trees!

Judith brushed heavy black lines to form the trunks, squeezing them in and pushing them out until they sinewed like dragons in the snow. The angular, delicate branches she rendered with smaller strokes of gray, and above, she painted smoky patches of clouds. Then I remembered the Kyoto dragon. Until I studied Judith’s painting I had never considered the big, old apple trees as orchard dragons — great beasts that inspire fear but have to be confronted on the hero’s journey.  

It makes me particularly sad to think that someday these old giants will be gone from the New England landscape. Orchardists planting new blocks of trees today plant dwarf trees that are supported by a structure of wires. These small trees are easier to care for, easier to harvest, produce earlier, and overall bring in more money per acre than growing standard size trees. 

We often sacrifice wildness for convenience, a new highway through the wilderness. I wonder if that’s what happened to the dragons.

Tree Rings

A cut through a large branch shows the yearly measures of growth. These rings have distinct colors, subtle patterns of orange, gold, and brown, not unlike the colors in the earth. Weather patterns determine this color and thickness. Years of rain and abundant growth produce thicker rings; narrow rings indicate a year of less growth. Colors reflect the changes during one growing season. Light shades indicate spring's rapid growth and darker colors mirror the late season's slowing down.

However, yearly weather patterns and the age of a tree are not the only information that can be found in the rings. When a branch is under stress because too much weight is pressing it towards the ground, the underside will bolster itself, like developing a triceps muscle. When you look at the cross-section of that branch, the rings on the underside are thicker and produce an oval shape. The branch bulked up to support the extra pressure.

Often people ask about the hollows found in old apple trees as well as other hard woods. The trees grow even when the center of the trunk is completely gone. What happened to this center and how does the tree still grow? A forester explained it to me this way. Trees have a two-cell thick cambium layer below the bark. This microscopic layer contains all the growing potential of the tree, generating new bark with the outer cells and new wood with the inner cells. A tree attacked by an invading fungus has to defend itself. The tree can’t move away and it can’t wipe out the fungus. However, when the tree senses this alien presence, the cells that normally produce wood create instead a thin layer as impassable as the Great Wall of China. This new layer separates the fungus from any future growth of the tree. Wood and bark then continue to grow isolated from the diseased center, in effect saying to the fungus, “Take this part of me, I surrender.”  For once these walls of demarcation are established, both tree and fungus thrive.

When a tree is bruised from outside like from a car crash, the tree grows a ‘harp’ shape to protect itself from this external injury. From both directions the tree grows inward sealing itself off from the wound. A few years ago, the caretaker of Walden Woods in Concord, who knew about my interest in ‘tree harps’ called and said there was a chunk of wood that he had pulled aside for me. “If you don't want it, it will be chopped for firewood,” he said. I could hear the drama in his voice and I drove over that afternoon. Near a mountain of split oak there sat what I can only describe as a giant set of ram’s horns. I took it back to my studio and carved out all of the rotten wood, eventually making it into the sculpture, Lidian’s Lyre, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian — who rarely gets credited for her part in the Transcendentalists’ activities.  

A tree’s wood remains as a testament to its age; its rings are a reminder of the seasons and the passing years. We, humans, unlike trees, don't have to carry all of our wood for our entire lives. Indeed many of the cells in our body renew themselves every few years. We don’t need to carry everything we ever did, thought, or felt; we can let go of ideas and patterns that no longer serve. When I am working on a sculpture it is satisfying to carve out the decayed wood and discover the intact hard wood. Here’s to clearing the mind and uncovering the thick rings of abundance.

The Fallen Tree

My neighbor, Ed, offered to help me right a fallen apple tree. This tree is large, one of the beauties in the orchard, and three months ago it fell over – onto its knees you might say.  The crop of fruit was so heavy it couldn’t support the weight. Leaning heavily to one side now, resting on some smaller limbs it waits. I know the roots must have been shattered, at least some of them, and it needs to be supported or it will fall over completely. But Ed thinks we should lift it back as upright as possible. I worry that we’ll do more damage. 

It’s this question that I am always encountering in the orchard.  How much do I control? How much in control am I?  I tell my neighbor that I hear what he is saying.  But I also know that this tree in the three months since it has fallen has done everything in its power to survive. Because nature wants to live. We all want to live. And it’s as much a question of spirit as it is about physical properties. 

Rudolph Steiner, the German philosopher, said that plants are intermediaries between the celestial bodies and the earth. This tree is alive. It connects the jays and the squirrels who bicker among the old, hanging fruit.  It connects my neighbor and me. We want to save it.

Two days later we meet. I have two wood two-by-fours for the tree’s support and we head to my shop to find bolts and nuts to put them together in an X shape. The fastener department in my shop is a medley of assorted screws, bolts, and other rusty paraphernalia. Ed picks up one bent bolt and says smiling, “Linda, you don’t really want to save this, do you?” Its curve echoes the crescent moon.  I see his point but I say, “I wanna keep it.” I keep most things, especially when they are worn, threadbare, or rusty. He puts it back in the drawer with the other straight ones. Then we take our doubled up two-by-fours, ropes, chains, a piece of rug to put between the support and the tree, chainsaw, and loppers.

He drives his tractor and I drive mine.  We position ourselves in adjacent rows on either side of the tree and string the ropes.  We put our tractors in four-wheel drive lo-gear so the pull will be slow and gentle.  I can’t hear Ed over the noise of the engines but see him nod, ‘ok’.  We both start backing up and the ropes and chains from the trunk to each of our tractors tighten and stretch. Ever so slowly, this huge towering beast starts to awaken from its slumber. There are no bumps or hesitations; the tree lifts up, a silent resurrection.

We stop pulling, keep the tractors running, and climb down to assess.  The tree is still leaning and Ed feels we should take it farther. The rising has been so easy and I don’t feel that we are further stressing the tree so I agree. We pull a little more and then decide it is enough. We install the support. Ed’s rope to his tractor is loose, but my tractor is still tethering the tree. Now is the test. As I drive forward and release the pressure will the tree support itself? I am anticipating that with the release there will be a settling back, but as I inch forward there isn’t the slightest movement of the tree.  It is magnificent standing there on its own with arching lower limbs.  Fruit still clings to its branches like holiday ornaments. 

I think about the moments when I am ‘bent out of shape’, when I am annoyed or frustrated, when there are things I would rather be doing than what I need to do. To what or to whom do I turn to lift me out of this bent state?  The meticulous attention required to right that tree and the act of working with my neighbor restored something in me. I remembered the bent nail in my studio fastener department. I decided to give it to Ed.

Wassailing the Apple Trees

On Saturday afternoon we will be wassailing the apple trees in the orchard at Old Frog Pond Farm. We want to thank them for such good harvest in 2015 and encourage their fruiting for 2016. Wassailing is an old English Christmas tradition where farmers would visit the orchards with bowls of cider and gather around one of the largest trees. They would pour libations on the roots and hang bits of bread dipped in cider on the limbs for the robins, the good spirits who would protect the trees. The farmers would of course drink the cider too, and then circling around the tree they would sing

Here's to thee, old apple-tree,
Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats-full! caps-full!
Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!
And my pockets full, too! Hurra!

Wassailing celebrates the gifts from the trees by returning a portion of what we have been given.  The ritual acknowledges nature’s generosity and our dependence on her. 

Bread and cider are the pagan sacraments for this orchard communion. Bread is food, a symbol for well-being, and physical sustenance. Cider quenches thirst — perhaps physical as well as spiritual. This golden juice is the sun, the rain, and the soil through the living tree.

Thoreau writes about wassailing in his essay, Wild Apples. He also mentions ‘apple howling’ where a group of boys would go out to the orchards and sing while knocking the trunks with sticks

Stand fast, root! bear well, top!
Pray God send us a good howling crop:
Every twig, apples big;
Every bough, apples enow!

This howling feels almost like a wake-up call, like the Zen masters’ use of the keisaku, the hitting stick to wake up their students and call them back to the reality of the present moment. “Don’t slumber too long, trees! We love you. We count on your fruit.”

For our Wassailing celebration at the farm, we’ll toast with our own hot mulled cider and listen to original poems written for the trees. We’ll sing and send out prayers that all creatures will have food, shelter, and bear fruit in 2016 — the microbial population in the soil,  sea turtles and polar bears, all people everywhere. If you’d like to join us, bring a little bread for the birds, and we’ll meet at 3 pm in the orchard.