'Cherries, Nectarines, Apricots and Early Peaches'

Neighbors gave us a sack of golf-ball-size peaches from the tree in their front yard. I’ve been watching it for months through the front window. They covered it with gauzy white netting resembling an oversized shower cap to keep off the bugs and squirrels, and generally babied the tree. The fruit is fuzzy, blemish-free and sweet. Because they are smaller than the peaches you find at the grocery store, you’re tempted to eat two or three at a time. We’re trying to be strong. 

Yvor Winters was the pomologist among poets. Along with raising goats and Airedales, he tended a small orchard of fruit trees at his home in Los Altos, Calif. On November 16, 1958, he writes to Don Cameron Allen at Johns Hopkins:

 

“The frost finished my fig crop, but ripened my persimmons and pineapple guavas. The last of my Valencia oranges were picked recently, but we are still eating them (they ripen in May). My tangerines will ripen around Christmas. My strawberry guava crop has just come to an end, after about two months of heavy production. My pomegranates are ripe. Most of my olives are picked (a big cast-iron washtub full) and I am now engaged in putting them in rock-salt (for Greek olives) and in the lye-and-brine cure.”

 

A professor at Stanford, an active poet and critic, a husband and father – and Winters finds the time to tend and harvest, by my count, eight varieties of fruit. It was from Winters that I first heard of loquats, and this Northerner first saw the trees here in Houston some twenty years ago  He goes on:  

 

“In May my loquats will ripen (loquats are one of the finest fruits I know, but they deteriorate rapidly after picking and so are never marketed) and I shall have loquats for two months. In early June my cherries, nectarines, apricots and early peaches, and in mid-June my early figs (white) and my first crop of black mission figs. In July my late peaches and the end of the loquats. The black figs should continue through half of July and start their second crop late in August, at which time my late white figs and grapes will be starting. In addition to this we have quinces, limequats, and Meyer lemons. The lemons and limequats bear fruit straight through the year.”

 

Throughout my life I have tended flower and vegetable gardens, never fruit trees. Few activities are so primally satisfying. In the summer before second grade (1959), I grew a small patch of watermelons beside the garage. At Christmas I gave my teacher, Miss Esson, the gift of a watermelon. The gift of peaches and Winters’ description of his orchard remind me of my favorite among his poems, “Time and the Garden,” including the opening lines:

 

“The spring has darkened with activity.

The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]