A Garden of Marvels Page 2

  I had seen such a marvel growing in the dirt floor of an old greenhouse at Logee’s Greenhouses in Danielson, Connecticut, when I was interviewing the owner for my previous book. It was magnificent, its leafy limbs brushing the glass roof and stippled with oranges, tangerines, lemons, limes, grapefruits, and kumquats, as well as hybrids like sunquats and limequats. It seemed the kind of tree that would harbor a grinning Cheshire cat or shade a blue caterpillar smoking a hookah. Possibly, it was magical: Eat one of the fruits and you live happily ever after.

  I wanted one.

  I wanted one not only because I have a weakness for the charmingly improbable, the scientifically curious, but because for me it would have a practical value. I have a collection of potted citrus that lives in our small conservatory in the winter. The conservatory faces north, not an ideal orientation, so I have to hang fluorescent grow lights to keep them alive through the season. For many years, I could gather all my trees under five long grow-lights where, lush and green and still holding the fruit of summer, they help me get through the dark days of winter. I’m a sucker, though, for trying unusual citrus varieties, so now three of the largest trees have to overwinter in the garage. There they go dormant and drop their leaves, looking like death until I rusticate them again in March, when light and warmth resurrect them. With a citrus cocktail tree, I could keep more varieties flowering and fruiting indoors when I’m most in need of their tonic beauty.

  I set about trying to buy one, and quickly discovered that no nurseries or garden centers in Maryland or Virginia carry a cocktail tree. No one had even heard of such a thing, although everyone found the idea intriguing. Logee’s had none, either, so I went farther afield and called retail nurseries in Florida, hoping someone might ship me one. Although employees there had heard of the tree, no one had one to sell. Finally, in January, I put in a call to the University of Florida Citrus Research and Education Center, and a professor suggested that I call Charles Farmer, owner of a citrus nursery in Auburndale, a town halfway between Tampa and Orlando. If anyone had a cocktail tree, he said, it would be Charles.

  But not even Charles had one.

  “Used to be some call for ’em,” he said over the phone in a drawl that sounded like Southern Comfort cut with a generous squeeze of lime. “Home Depot ordered a thousand back in ’92, but then canceled on me. It’s no problem, though, for me to make you one.”

  It’s no problem, I discovered, because Charles is in the business of making citrus trees, about a hundred thousand of them every year. I use “making” advisedly. Most commercial citrus trees are not grown from seeds. Plant a seed you’ve found in a tangerine, for example, and if the little sapling doesn’t first succumb to bacteria, viruses, nematodes, or fungi, you will have to wait years for it to grow large enough to fruit. Even when your tree reaches maturity, its tangerines will probably be sparse on the boughs and smaller than what you can find at the grocery.

  Instead of planting seeds, commercial growers buy grafted saplings, either to start a new grove or to fill in an existing one where individuals have died. Grafted trees like Charles’s are made of a hardy rootstock species—often a sour orange—onto which is grafted a more commercially desirable variety (the “scion”), like a Satsuma or a blood orange. The rootstock imparts vigor, disease resistance, or cold tolerance, or a combination of those qualities to the fruit-bearing branches. The rootstock can also improve the yield of the scion or intensify the flavor of its fruit. Of course, seedless citrus varieties must be grafted to reproduce at all.

  Charles assured me he could easily ship me a cocktail tree. I was thrilled. Could he ship it in its pot, or would that be too heavy? I hoped he wouldn’t have to bare-root it, I told him, because I was afraid I would kill it in the repotting.

  He laughed. Shipping was no problem because what he intended to send me was a “liner.” A liner is a twenty-four-inch-high grafted sapling with a trunk like a pencil and rooted in a four-inch-diameter, eighteen-inch-deep pot.

  I tried not to sound disappointed since this seemed to be my best chance for a cocktail tree. But such a little specimen, especially at my northerly latitude and indoors during the winter, would take years to produce any fruit. Was there any way I could get a bigger tree?

  “Sure thing,” he said, “if you’re willing to come down here and cart it back home. I got a nice six-foot Hamlin orange in a thirty-five-gallon pot that I can do for you. It’d be ready next spring. That fast enough for you?”

  Actually, it was not. That was fifteen months away. I imagined Charles attaching slender branches to the thick trunk of the Hamlin the way a surgeon might reattach amputated fingers onto a hand. I pictured a heavy wrapping of bandages around the juncture of old and new wood, and fleetingly wondered whether he used wires to hold a branch in place while the new joint healed. Surely, the tissues would knit together and wounds would close in a matter of weeks or, at the most, a couple of months, as they did in skin. It shouldn’t, it seemed to me, take more than a year for a connection to form. Why was it, I asked tentatively, that I couldn’t get it sooner?

  Charles began to explain, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then, suddenly I got it: My analogy was wrong. He would be grafting buds, not branches, onto the Hamlin. Grafted buds “take” in a couple of weeks, but they need a year or more in Florida’s climate to develop from bud to branch. And the best season for grafting is in spring, when the trees are actively growing and sap is flowing. Hence the fifteen months.

  Charles added that the bulk of his business is producing liners in his greenhouses. From time to time, however, he and Susan, his wife and business partner, get a call to “topwork” mature trees in a grove, transforming them from one variety to another. Recently, for example, when the market price of navel oranges fell and seemed unlikely to recover, a farmer nearby hired him to turn fifteen acres of navel oranges into fifteen acres of Valencias. Topworking is expensive, as might be expected for such major magic, but, he said, “it sure beats bulldozing and starting from scratch.” Topworking was what he planned to do to a Hamlin orange tree for me. The only question he had was what varieties I wanted on my tree. I wasn’t particular, I said, as long as I got a range of fruit colors. I didn’t plan on eating my crop—I can buy fruit in the grocery store—I just wanted to look at it. He chuckled, and said okay. I have no doubt that no one had ever asked him to graft a tree for its aesthetic appeal.

  I announced (well, maybe I exulted) to my friend Edie, a buyer at a local garden center, that I’d found someone who would make me a cocktail tree. She looked skeptical. I’d better be careful, she said; there were restrictions on taking citrus trees out of Florida. That seemed hard to credit—wasn’t Florida all about shipping citrus?—but I looked into it and found that indeed the U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits the transportation of citrus trees out of the state. The regulation is an effort to prevent a bacterial disease called “the greening” from spreading beyond Florida to other citrus-producing states. The greening, also known as Huanglongbing or the yellow dragon disease, is caused by a bacterial infection and transmitted by a plant louse. The infection causes leaves to turn yellow and fall off, sours the fruit, and ultimately kills the host. Violations of the regulation are punishable by fines from $500 to $10,000. There was a bit of hope, though. Shortly before I made this disheartening discovery, the USDA proposed regulations that would allow licensed growers, by virtue of taking extra precautions and undergoing additional inspections, to earn a certificate to ship out of state.

  When I called Charles to tell him about the problem, I got an earful. He was already a licensed grower, he already followed all the costly procedures to ensure his trees were free of disease, he already was inspected regularly. He had no interest in more paperwork, more fees, and more inspectors poking around. The whole thing was ridiculous since I would be driving directly to Maryland, where there is no citrus industry and not even any backyard citrus trees. The regulations, he insisted, made no sense in my case. I told hi
m I’d contact the USDA and see if they ever issued waivers. I called, but the people at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) were clear: no exceptions, not even for a Marylander who promised to drive with her windows rolled up and not to stop—not even to eat, much less stay overnight—in Georgia or South Carolina where citrus are cultivated or even North Carolina or Virginia where they are not.

  When I phoned Charles a third time, he really growled. Back in the mid-1980s, he recalled, the regulations on budding were tough due to a canker outbreak. “They actually had Yankees come down that didn’t know anything about citrus that was watching us professionals. We had to get a ‘budding card’ and show it every time some inspector come by. And inspectors’d park out on the road, and we’d have to walk all the way back out from where we was budding, over that burning hot sugar sand, every time they showed up.”

  I thought I was out of luck, that he’d never agree to apply for the additional certificate, but I misunderstood his temperament. Having sent a little steam through the ether, he then amiably agreed to help me out, me, a Yankee he’d never even met. He would make the application whenever the regulations became final. And he and Susan would take care of my tree in the meantime. Since I fly regularly to Florida to visit my mother, who lives about two hours south, in Fort Myers, I asked if I could drive up and watch him graft my tree the next time I was in the state.

  And so it is that I am in this greenhouse sweating like a sprinkler system and shaking hands with Charles and Susan. Both look to be about fifty, and are lean and deeply tanned. Charles has a square jaw and prominent cheekbones (thanks, I learn, to his Osage Indian heritage), emphasized by his shaved head. He is dressed in baggy, knee-length shorts and a faded Hawaiian shirt and has a wide smile; Susan wears shorts and a white halter top, and a visor wraps around her sun-streaked hair. Both hold what look like paring knives and have bumpy rubber sheaths on their thumbs. Susan has several ragged bandages around her fingers.

  After we introduce ourselves, Susan announces that she’s going to get the budsticks from the refrigerator in the office, and I follow Charles, who is heading to the far end of the greenhouse. I hustle, dripping, to keep up. Our destination is a row of lush and leafy six- and seven-foot trees in black plastic tubs.

  “These here are our budwood trees for Hamlin orange,” Charles says. “They’re certified disease-free by the state. When we get an order for Hamlins, we take buds from these trees and graft them onto a Swingle rootstock.” Swingle is a particularly vigorous variety of citrumelo, which is itself a cross between an inedible grapefruit and an inedible orange. If a Swingle were to grow to maturity, its fruit would be small, sour, and full of seeds.

  Charles heads to a tree in the row. It looks as if a hurricane has blown through this particular individual and stripped it of most of its small branches and leaves. It’s a skeleton clothed in rags. This, it turns out, is my tree.

  I’m dismayed, but Charles tells me with obvious satisfaction that he chose it specifically for me because it has five good “scaffold” limbs. (Scaffold limbs are like railroad trunk lines off which all the local lines run.) My tree hasn’t lost its foliage; Charles has stripped it down in preparation for grafting. On each of the scaffold limbs, he will graft two buds from five different citrus species. The remaining Hamlin branches and leaves will sustain the tree while the grafts grow out. Then he’ll remove what is left of the Hamlin beyond the trunk.

  Susan arrives with the budsticks, which are also certified disease-free, in individual plastic bags. She and Charles have chosen Meyer lemon, Eureka variegated lemon, Bearss lime, Cara Cara navel, and Minneola tangelo. The budsticks are bumpy foot-long pieces of quarter-inch-diameter stem stripped of leaves and twigs.

  Charles explains. “Look in here,” he says, pulling down a branch of the Hamlin and pointing into the angle—the armpit, you might say—between a branch and a leaf stem.

  “See that?” he asks. I see a pointed bump. “That’s an axillary leaf bud, or what we call the eye. The tree doesn’t need the eye to grow now so it’s dormant. It has the potential, though, to become a new branch. The budsticks also have eyes and what we’re going to do is take eyes off ’em, and use a chip graft to put ’em into the branches of the Hamlin.”

  Charles takes his knife to the Hamlin, first making an inch-long vertical cut through the bark into the wood, then slicing horizontally to create an upside-down T. Then he turns to the budstick, and shows me the eye he plans to excise. Holding the budstick so its upper end points away from him, he draws the knife toward his body to make a shallow inch-long slice—the chip—just under the bark surrounding a bud. Finally, he slips the bud (pointing upward) beneath the bark flaps of the Hamlin, takes a roll of green plastic tape from his pocket, and wraps the wound with a length of tape.

  In (A), a bud is excised from a budstick. The grafter makes an inverted T in the bark of the rootstock (B), and slips the bud under the flaps (C), before wrapping the graft with tape. In (D), the cambium layers have fused and the bud is fully integrated.

  The key, he says, is getting the cambium layers, which lie just beneath the bark in both the bud and the rootstock, close to each other. The cambium is exceedingly thin, but its cells are much like stem cells in animals, that is, they are able to generate different cell types. (The cambium is too shallow to observe without a microscope, but in the spring, if you peel back the bark on a twig, the moist surface is cambium.) In a successful graft, cambium cells link tissues and vessels in the rootstock to the equivalent tissues and vessels in the bud, permanently connecting them. In two weeks, those connections will have been made, and he’ll remove the tape. In the bright sunlight of central Florida, it won’t be long until the buds become slender, leafy young branches.

  Ten minutes later (and going slowly so I can watch his technique), Charles is finished making my tree. With a lifetime of practice, he can make a graft in seconds. What’s more, 99 percent of the grafts that he and Susan make—and he estimates they’ve made more than a million—are successful.

  Before I go, we sit down at a picnic table sheltered by a majestic live oak, the only shade tree on the property, to talk, and Susan offers to get us some “ostee.” I don’t know what that is, but accept, thinking it might be something like candied citrus peel. What I’d really like is something to drink, so I’m delighted when ostee turns out to be Southern for iced tea, sweet enough to fur the tongue. We laugh about the differences between our accents and cultures, but actually, Charles tells me, he was born a northerner.

  “Mom and Dad was on their way back from Michigan where they was picking apples. They was migratory, so they would start on cotton in the south, then tobacco, cherries, and apples, doing the full route south to north. Well, they ended up on the apples, and was on their way back to Florida to start buddin’ when Mom went into labor in Cincinnati. After three or four days, they turned her loose, and we shot straight on down here. Been here,” he said with satisfaction, “ever since.” Well, he amends, there was one year of college at Kent State in Ohio before he saw the error of his ways.

  Charles and Susan have been in the citrus business for more than thirty years now, first as budders in others’ groves, and then on their own property and in their own greenhouses. It’s been no easy life. The work is hot and tedious; outdoors the mosquitoes and gnats can be fierce; and they are constantly pierced by thorns. Few Americans are willing to help them do it, and even immigrant labor is tough to come by. Citrus diseases and the resulting quarantines have put them out of action more than once. Freezes have hurt, too. For years, Charles had to go to the Bahamas to bud in order to keep them afloat financially.

  “This past winter,” Susan says, “our lemons and limes was just poleaxed, down to the ground. The problem was it had been in the nineties when the freeze hit. The trees wasn’t dormant and when the cold hit, the sap was flowing in them.” (Frost damages plants when the liquid inside individual cells freezes and forms ice crystals that rupture the cell walls.
When later the ice melts, the fluids drain out, so death actually comes from dehydration.) They had to bulldoze four acres of trees. Recently, they’ve added blueberry bushes to the property, in an attempt at diversification.

  Later, as the two of them walk me to my car, I ask Susan how she knows when it’s time to water her trees. She tells me it’s easy: She gives each pot a kick every day, and she can hear by the sound. Before I can formulate a follow-up question—what exactly are the sounds of dryness—she reminds me I’ll have to prune the lemon branches hard. Charles had grafted the lemon buds onto the narrowest limbs to give the other varieties a head start, but lemon species are vigorous and will quickly shade out the other varieties if I’m not careful. Then Charles unlocks the chain-link gate, and I drive carefully between the ruts in the dirt yard. In no time at all, I’m heading out along Interstate 4 back to Fort Myers, air-conditioning on high, as visions of citrus fruits—yellow, pink, orange, red, and striped—dance in my head.

  two

  The Birth and Long Life of the Vegetable Lamb

  My fruit cocktail tree is man-made, but theoretically one could develop naturally. Wild grafts can arise when limbs from two genetically similar trees—a lemon and a lime, for example, or two apple varieties, or two stone fruits, like a nectarine and a peach—come in continuous contact with each other. As the limbs rub together in the wind, the bark of both wears away at the point of contact, and ultimately their exposed cambium layers fuse. Cut either branch free of its parent and it will rely on the root system of its neighbor to prosper. Since the medieval era, gardeners have used this natural phenomenon to create living fences. “Pleaching” involves interweaving the branches of a line of young trees or shrubs, scoring through the barks to the cambiums where they intersect, and then tying the intersections in place to ensure they graft.