Southern Apples, an Elephant, Monkey, Rabbit, and Bird, Two Mango Trees and a Birthday

I celebrated my 60th birthday this week. My partner, Blase, gave me a first edition of the book Old Southern Apples, written by Lee Calhoun. Southern apples might sound like an oxymoron, since not many people think of the South as an Eden of apples. But over 1300 varieties originated south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and these apples are an important part of the area’s agrarian history. Old Southerners not only talk about Bloody Butcher corn and Red Ripper peas, but the now extinct apples like Fall Ambrosia (sounds so delicious), and the still available Limbertwigs.

Old Southern Apples describes the unique features of over 1600 apple varieties (though 300 of them originated elsewhere but were grown in the South). The book divides these apples between 300 still growing or available at nurseries and 1300 now extinct Southern apples, the names and descriptions mostly taken from old nursery catalogues (a coincidence that both numbers are 300). The book also contains forty-eight plates of hand-painted apple pictures selected from the seven thousand in the collection of the National Agricultural Library. That was from the days when the United States Department of Agriculture hired artists!

Old Southern Apples, Plates 15 - 18; Photos: Jerry Markatos 

As you may know, apples grown from seed are the unique progeny of two parents, because the blossoms are cross pollinated. Most of these seeded trees crop with hard, sour, or small fruit, better for the hogs than for eating off the tree. Some apples are good for making hard cider and apple cider vinegar, but a few trees out of a thousand planted might produce unexpected, remarkable apples that would be given names and propagated. Of the 1600 apple varieties mentioned in this book, all of them grew from seed to be extraordinary apples. In the South, whether the settlers were large landowners or tenant farmers, they all planted out their orchards with seeds, they didn’t set out grafted rootstocks. It was the way it was done.

Today, it would be the rare individual who would scatter seeds to plant an orchard. After all, who would want a collection of wild apples? Large orchardists order sapling trees from wholesale nurseries in the thousands or even ten thousand. Blocks of the same variety, interspersed with another variety for pollinating, are planted. It is the researchers who cross apples and come up with new varieties for orchards to trial. A few apples become the darlings of the marketplace. This approach to apple growing is very different from the grand creativity that nature realizes with such ease. As Lao Tzu said, Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Inside my card, Blase tucked a print-out of a Buddhist tale. When King Mahajanaka, an earlier incarnation of the Buddha, was traveling through a park, he saw a monkey sitting on a branch of a mango tree. The King longed to stop and pick a few mangoes, but traveling with his large retinue, he had to continue without stopping. He decided he would sneak back alone that night to pick a few mangoes. That night, when he got to the grove, he lifted his torchlight and saw that someone had gotten there before him. The mango tree was stripped bare of fruit; its limbs were broken and its leaves lay scattered everywhere. He was saddened to think that this beautiful tree would likely not survive this ravagement. Then he saw another mango tree, one that had not been harmed. He realized that this tree avoided the carousing thieves because it had no fruit. The King returned and pondered his experience with the two mango trees. He decided he would renounce his title and give away everything he owned. He would become a tree without fruit. I love the story of the King Mahajanaka and the mango tree, but it could be taken as a teaching in renunciation. As many of you know, the orchard at Old Frog Pond Farm had no apples this year, and it was not because I renounced my title of orchardist.

The Birthday card Blase gave me was hand painted in Bhutan; he had saved it from our trip seven years ago. It is of a bird on a rabbit on a monkey’s shoulder, on an elephant (the bird and rabbit are hard to see). They are walking under a mango tree laden with fruit. It is an illustration of the “Four Harmonious Friends,” a much loved Bhutanese tale. These animals worked together; the bird planted the seed, the rabbit watered the sapling, the monkey fertilized it, and the elephant protected it until it grew into a beautiful tree with fruit for all of them.

"Four Harmonious Friends" handpainted in Bhutan

I loved my gift of so many fruit related stories. Our orchard is so much more than its acres of grafted trees. It’s a language we speak and share; a wild grove of poetry, paintings, sunsets, clouds, blossoms, and, hopefully next year, delicious fruit.

The Tools of Art

Today I live on a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, where I tend the growth of three hundred apples trees, forty Asian pears, and a large fall raspberry crop. But fifteen years ago, I was an artist who lived in Groton with my husband and three children. Growing fruit was not on my radar, though like many New Englanders, we went apple picking every fall. 

There was always a festive atmosphere of pumpkins, corn stalks, and apple baskets on Old Ayer Road in September. Hundreds of people came with their cars packed for a day in the country. A traffic cop directed the crossing as diesel tractors pulled hay wagons filled with families to different blocks of the orchard. Long lines formed at the farm-stand windows, and customers paid for their bags before heading into the trees for picking. We picked apples, climbing often to the top of that beautiful orchard.

Then one year, the orchard suddenly closed, and a sadness blanketed the hillside. The branches no longer blossomed in spring, and fruit no longer weighted the branches in fall. What was happening in Groton was no different than what was happening all over the country. In the United States, between 1900 and 2010, the number of farms decreased from 30 million to 2 million, a staggering tsunami of change.

Living in rural New England in the nineties, I had a first row seat to witness the disappearance of farmland from the landscape. The vanishing happened as quickly as a magician’s trick; an apple orchard became Orchard Lane with twenty-five new houses. A dairy farm became Easy Acres, a sub-division with forty duplexes. It was sad to watch and there was little I could do. However,  when something bothers me, I find it appearing in my art. I put a notice in the local newspaper asking for donations of old agricultural tools for an artwork about the disappearance of farmland. From one small notice in the Groton Herald, the phone started to ring. People responded with warmth and generosity. Usually it was a single tool, a saw that had belonged to a grandfather, a scythe, or a treasured rake. One man offered me rough-sawn boards with sinuous edges.

In little time, I had a collection of tools that evoked human effort, the sweat and muscle of hand labor. I took a heavy garden fork and a selection of colors from my box of Shaker tape, the remnant material from chair-making, a gift from the owner of Shaker workshops. I wove these colorful bands through the tines of the fork and wrote a poem to accompany the sculpture.

Common Land, LH

Another tool was a gift from a veterinarian in Groton. She gave me a five-foot saw with a mosaic of cutting teeth. I was definitely a ‘tree hugger.’ I hated to see trees taken down along town roads. I bemoaned electric wires that cut through their butchered canopies. There was a great tree in the common near the Nashua River. One day a large painted orange ‘X’ appeared on it. The next day, I spray painted that ‘X’ brown to match the bark and the state highway men drove right by it. 

The second sculpture I made was Marked Trees, created with this five-foot saw blade, bands of green cloth, and long slivers of sawn wood.

green woods
old pasture
buried rust

 the saw sharp
silence
of marked trees  

I loved these tools and the stories they evoked. They brought out sorrow, loneliness, and longing. A wheel, a bucket, and an old piece of rope became the sculpture, Empty Barn.

Saving a woodlot is relatively easy; saving a farm is not as simple — you need a farmer.

Now, fifteen years later, I am an artist and a farmer with many old agricultural tools. Old Frog Pond Farm’s annual outdoor sculpture exhibit gathers artists from all over New England who celebrate the connection between art and the natural world in their work. The old agricultural tools no longer evoke sadness and loss; I work with them in the soil or plant them as sculpture.

The Juggler in the Orchard, An old cultivator and river stones. Photo: Ricardo Barros

Fifteen years ago I never imagined I would have brought a dying orchard back to health. When I put the intention to save farmland into my art, I didn't imagine I would become that farmer. I guess it’s important to know what you really want. What we really intend, does come true.

Labyrinths

In 2003, I was asked to create an outdoor labyrinth for Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA. While working on the design, I got an excited call from the curator: I think there’s a basket with a labyrinth design in the Native American collection.

I drove right over to see it. The design is what the Pima people of Arizona call Man in the Maze. A figure stands at the entrance about to enter the labyrinth. Tight concentric rows of light fibers radiate out from the center of the basket. Dark fibers delineate the walking path. This indeed is a true labyrinth. Mazes have dead ends, and the traveler must often retrace her steps and start over. A labyrinth is a continuous journey to the center and back out. But this continuous journey can turn you in unexpected directions. Labyrinths often lead you first almost to the center, and the mind can be fooled into thinking how easy the quest seems to be. But then the path takes you back out, around and around, then almost back to the beginning of your journey. Ironically, it’s at this point, when you might be tempted to give up, that you now make your last circumambulation and head straight to the center. If you put a finger on the little figure at the edge of the basket, you can trace the journey.

Pima Basket

Perfectly round and flat, this Pima basket in the museum’s collection might have once been once used in a sacred ceremony. I used the design to create the large outdoor labyrinth that was at Fruitlands from 2005 until 2015. 

Walking the Labyrinth at Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA in 2005

The story of the Minoan Labyrinth in Crete kindled my interest in labyrinths. It was built by the inventor, Daedalus, for King Minos to house the great Minotaur, a beast half human and half bull. Fourteen Athenian youths sailed to Crete annually as part of a sacrifice to feed the ravenous creature. Theseus, the prince, decided he would go, slay the minotaur, and end the sacrifice.  

When they arrived at the palace of King Minos, his daughter, Ariadne, met this handsome lad, and fell in love with him. In secret she gave him a red ball of string and a sword so he could slay the Minotaur, find his way back out, and take her away with him. All this came to be. He rescued her and off they sailed – away from her homeland, father, the patriarchy . . . 

The boat landed for a stop on the island of Naxos, but when it set sail again, Theseus was on board and Ariadne remained behind. Did he ‘dump’ her (in the common vernacular) after using her ingenuity to complete his quest? Most readings of the myth describe the distress of the abandoned Ariadne, and this seems quite plausible. But it is worth considering that maybe Ariadne used Theseus to orchestrate her own escape. Maybe she purposely missed the boat? Did she really want to exchange life in one palace, as the daughter of a king, for life in another, as daughter-in-law to another king? Perhaps she escaped from her own labyrinth and was able to choose a different path.

Theseus may have desperately looked for her, and when he couldn’t find her, had to choose between remaining behind searching or sailing off with his companions. The ending of the myth is Theseus’ sad return. In his distress, he forgot to lift a white sail to indicate to his father that he was returning alive. When King Aegeus saw the ship’s black sails, he threw himself over the parapet, thinking his son was dead. Maybe slaying the Minotaur is getting rid of the reigning patriarchy, whichever way we interpret the myth.

Myths serve the reader in offering multiple interpretations. Labyrinths instruct the walker as he or she practices concentration, letting go, perseverance, and trust. When Fruitlands pulled up the labyrinth a year ago, they asked if I wanted the stones and I said, yes. They arrived in a big dump truck, and the pile awaits. I understand why the Pima Indians put their labyrinths on baskets — much easier to transport — especially when you move with the seasons. Perhaps it’s time to put some order to the stone pile and build a labyrinth here. 

Repairing the Broken

 “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong in the broken places.”

                                                                           —Ernest Hemmingway

In the Japanese pottery world there is an old tradition, Kintsugi (golden joinery), of repairing a broken pot with gold. The pot might have been a prized tea ceremony bowl, revered with the eye and treasured with the hand. Instead of tossing the pot broken by some mishap into the rubbish pile, the pieces would be fitted back together and held by lacquer mixed with gold powder. Kintsugi became an art form. A newly repaired bowl with threads of gold has more appeal than the unbroken one.

Teabowl, Yamamoto Gempo (1866-1961) photo courtesy of Backmann Eckenstein Newsletter

Kintsugi is connected to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi. Wabi might translate as loneliness or solitariness —the sight of a lone crow on a crooked branch or a plum blossom peeking through light snow. Sabi refers to objects that exude the well-worn, rustic patina of age.  Wabi-sabi informs the aesthetics of the traditional Japanese arts. An object doesn’t need to be discarded because it is worn and old. On the contrary, we treasure it even more.

I lived in Japan in my early twenties, and I consider wabi-sabi to be a strong influence on my own aesthetics. I love using old tools, worn objects, and wood in my art. Wood, its knots, rings, and branch collars, carries the history of the life of the tree. Similarly, pottery carries its past; the clay was created in the earth hundreds of years ago. We have an intuitive attraction to that which is old and from the earth. We trust its wisdom. Without knowing about Kintsugi, when I made my first large-scale outdoor sculpture using tree logs from a hundred-year-old maple that fell in a winter storm, I gold leafed its sawn surfaces to highlight its beauty and give it new life.

The repairs of Kintsugi draw our attention to the impermanence of life. In fact, it is emphasized and celebrated. The repairs to the bowl add to its beauty. How is it that our culture wants to deny this reality? From blemish-free apples to wrinkle-free faces to the ideal relationship, we are directed to strive for perfection as if it was attainable and permanent.

In the third stanza of Jane Hirshfield’s poem, For What Binds Us, she writes:

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

I can recall as a child sitting with friends as we showed off our scars and shared our battle stories.

I have a tea mug I use every day. It’s one that my son, Alex, a potter and the founder of East Fork Pottery, made over ten years ago when he was a freshman at Guilford College. It’s the only piece of pottery that still exists from that time. At home, we keep all of our mugs on two open shelves in the kitchen. When my beloved Alex mug is on the shelf and a houseguest decides to choose a cup, they infallibly choose this one. There is little about it that would make you prefer it from among the two shelves of mugs. Yet there must be something that communicates, whether it is our intuitive attraction to the patina of age or the subtle power of something treasured. No one seems to be concerned with the hairline crack down the inside of it. I care for this mug tenderly.

Mug, Alex Matisse, fourth from right on bottom shelf  

Eventually, my Alex mug will likely break. I will need to learn how to make a Kintsugi repair in preparation for that day. 

The gold we need for each repair is available in many forms — a hot bowl of soup, a knitted scarf, a poem, acts of courage, love and compassion — we can see them all as gold threads we offer to heal this earth and each other.