Our plan is to attend a lecture this evening on the OSU campus. The talk... "Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want"... is by Frances Moore Lappe, author of 17 books including Diet for a Small Planet (3 million copies in print). She has helped start 3 Earth-centered organizations, including 'Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, and the Small Planet Institute, plus the recent Small Planet Fund. Quite the human! We're excited about hearing her.
So how to spend the day leading up to this event? I decided to be an observer... and chose our dwarf apple tree in the back yard as my subject. The tree predates us on this bit of Earth... as a dwarf, it's hard to tell how old it might be, but a guess would be 10 years. I've severely pruned it to conform to a modest trellis, so it's only 7' tall with a branch-spread of 8' and a thickness (the east-west dimension) of 24". I've left 3 main branches on each side (the north-south dimension), with one major center shoot. All seven branches are bushy, and the result today is an amazing display of blossoms... fist-sized bunches of between 4 and 7 perfect white blooms, each with 5 petals streaked with several tiny reddish veins. There are about 80 blossom clusters altogether.
The most remarkable feature of the tree today, if you approach softly, is the hum... the entire tree seems to vibrate, to hum, with life. And it is life... the fruits which we will enjoy in October are being pollinated today by a variety of varmints from ants to bees. There are about 15 honeybees... our most common pollinator... helped by 3 varieties of what look like bumblebees, though none are any bigger than the honeybees, and each has a distinctive outer jacket over the abdomen (varied stripes of yellow on black). Then there are two kinds of wasps, two kinds of ants (one big and slow, another tiny and hurried), and one tiny bee that doesn't resist when I ask it to sit on my finger. All are determined to visit every blossom before sunset and evening cool.
So this beautiful little tree is a very active community today. The combination of pollinators and sunshine and warmth and all those dreary rainy days of winter and spring will bring us, with luck, several buckets of glossy reddish apples. Picked ripe, they make a sauce that needs no sweetener, and a pie that is ... well, American!
It's fun to spend a few minutes looking at the anatomy of an apple blossom... all those long-forgotten terms from 10th-grade biology (petals, corolla, stigmas, pistils, pollen, anthers, stamens and more) come back and, unlike when you were 15, they actually are interesting. Ruby and I spent a few minutes appreciating the blossoms this morning... at eleven months, her attention span is pretty short... she liked the fact that just the slightest touch makes a delicate snow of white petals.
We're all wrestling with the concept of how to achieve the ' World we really want' these days. We're addicted to so many comforts and habits that are devastating the Earth, not so much because of us as because there are so many of us (early July will bring the seven-billionth human!). We're struggling with redefining our needs and our wants, and differentiating between our benign entitlements and those that are crippling this Small Planet. So complex, and different for each of us. My tree today was another lesson... we've been warned that that hum of our local pollinators will not survive 'climate change' intact. It's my greatest fear, I think: That my grandchildren might one day stand where I did today, admiring the blossoms on that perfect little tree, and not hear the hum. And not get the apples. And not have all that I have had. They deserve the same Earth-blessings I have had, and we must change to assure that that happens.
We'll take the bus to the lecture, and probably walk home. Three-plus miles, dark, stars. I love the hum of an apple tree on May 4th! And I love my grandchildren!
Namaste.
Kirk
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