The Golden Chain

78 Lucky Peach BRIDGET HUBER ILLUSTRATIONS BY mATT PANUSKA The PLAnt KingDoM 79 the shoots with long-handled n a fall day in 1970, Amigo Bob pruners and uses the blades Cantisano was barreling down like chopsticks to hand me each one. The sticks are cool an old dirt road in California’s and smell fresh, apple-ish, with a skin of silvery bark and Sierra Nevada Mountains when a razor-thin layer of char- the dark woods abruptly opened treuse tissue, called cambium, beneath. The tree is a Bart- into a clearing. There stood a lett-type pear, which is com- ramshackle orchard that was long abandoned mon, but this tree has survived O 150 years of droughts, floods, but loaded with ripe pears and apples. Year after and pests. One pest in particular has year for most of the next forty-four falls, Amigo been especially devastating to returned to pick fruit without intervention, the pear trees in recent years: fire blight, a bacteria that enters bears his only competition. “This outrageous fruit trees through their flowers and can spread all the way to was growing by itself in a gorgeous spot,” says the roots, leaving them black Amigo, who got his nickname from a high-school and shriveled as if they’ve been burned. In 2013, Frog Hollow girlfriend. “I didn’t have a clue why.” Farm, an organic fruit farm in Brentwood, lost almost seven hundred trees and was left Eventually, he pieced salt-and-pepper dreadlocks that hang like jungle with a “pear graveyard.” If all it together: the trees were vines, the longest grazing the back of his knees. He’s goes well, in a little over a year, planted around 150 years ago an autodidact who makes his living by helping com- the farm may plant seedlings by a gold miner named L.F.K. panies like Fetzer Vineyards, Sunkist, and Del Monte propagated from the cuttings Buck, and tended by his four grow organic. When I meet him, Amigo is wearing we’re taking today, in the hope lifelong-bachelor sons who a kaleidoscopic tie-dye shirt and a white felted hat that whatever special resist- sold produce to workers at the the shape of a toadstool cap. ance this tree seems to have Orleans Flat gold mine. There In Amigo’s Subaru (license plate: WNA BFRE), we developed will protect Frog are places like it all across Gold head to Goodyears Bar, a once-thriving mining town Hollow’s orchards, too. Locat- Country: ghost towns, for- founded on a flat that straddles the Yuba River where, ing and spreading resistant gotten stagecoach stops, and it was said, men could sift $2,000 worth of gold from varieties is especially pressing faded boomtowns full of feral a single wheelbarrow of dirt. Back in the 1800s, there since organic growers lost their fruit trees, planted in a wave of were bakeries, saloons, a school, and more than six best weapon against the blight gilded optimism and abandoned hundred residents; now there are only sixty-eight. in 2014—an antibiotic spray when gold fever broke. On a sunny slope, where just a couple houses and a unpopular with both environ- Amigo is one of the pio- camper are left, rusty reminders of the mining days mentalists and consumers. neers of organic agriculture are piled in great drifts everywhere—an old cart, “Fucking environmentalists,” in California. He’s been farm- piles of spikes, lengths of chain. A series of crooked growls Amigo. “We don’t have ing for over forty years, and in paddocks holds stocky animals—a furry snub-nosed anything else to kill it.” 1973 he cofounded California steer, bearded goats, and a pair of mini-donkeys. Amigo is a seventh- Certified Organic Farmers, one We cross the goat pen and find ourselves in generation Californian, a San of the first organic certification front of a raggedy pear tree with a big open- Francisco native who went programs in the U.S. He helped ing in its trunk. It’s perforated with woodpecker back to the land when the city write the first law legally defin- holes and patchy with yellow lichen. But at the clogged with flower children. ing organic practices in Cali- top, above some dead-looking limbs, is a bris- He’s collected and sold ladybugs, fornia, passed in 1979. He has tling crown of new, skinny branches. “This is a run an olive oil company, and snowy, bushy sideburns and very special tree,” Amigo says. He clips of some of even spent a few days working 80 Lucky Peach for a circus. He met his fiancée, f you bury an apple or pear Of alien trees and apples Jenifer Bliss, eleven years ago; seed, chances are what sprouts up not her own. she was his grandson’s Head will look nothing like its parent. But getting the “batten- Start teacher. These days, Bliss Instead, you’ll get a wildling—often a weird ing bastard” to take requires and Amigo, along with a young fruit with a taste that could, in Henry David some manipulation of time and farmer named Adam Nuber, Thoreau’s words, “set a squirrel’s teeth on space. You cut the scion before operate under the auspices edge and make a jay scream.” Fruits like the tree’s buds start to break, of the Felix Gillet Institute, a Iapples don’t breed true, because they are what are but you can’t graft it onto the nonprofit dedicated to finding known as heterozygotes—their genetics include stock until the stock has bro- and saving heirloom peren- variations that recombine unpredictably. (Which ken its dormancy weeks later. nial food plants in the Sierra means even the Red Delicious, that dullest of apples, So you hold the scion in a state Nevada foothills. It’s named carries chaos inside.) If you’re a commercial fruit of suspended animation—in after a French barber turned grower, you really want a clone—what’s called a this case, a fridge—until the nurseryman who introduced named variety. To get what you want—a Bosc pear stock starts to draw moisture hundreds of fruit and nut vari- or a Bing cherry—you have to graft it. In the win- from the ground and send sug- eties to California starting in ter or early spring, while the trees are dormant, you ars through its trunk. Then, the late 1800s. The trio prowls take a cutting of the youngest growth of the variety you make a cut in the stock and Gold Country’s byways, looking you want: that’s the scion. Then in the spring, when insert the scion, taking care to for old trees along back roads sap is flowing and bark is easy to move, you insert line up the cambium on both and abandoned homesteads, it into the tissue of an already-established tree, pieces. If the species are similar some of which they propagate the stock. The scion and the stock will fuse and the enough, and the graft doesn’t and sell. So far, they’ve found scion branches will produce the kind of fruit you’re dry out, the cells will recognize more than three thousand old after. Grafting is both miraculous and mundane. one another and knit together fruit and nut trees, roses, and Every Pink Lady apple or Bartlett pear is the result to become one. berries, and have a list of more of grafting, but at the same time, it’s witchy and A history of grafting pub- than six hundred sites, many of astonishing that parts of two separate plants can lished in Horticultural Reviews which they haven’t had time to become a single organism. in 2009 dates the practice back visit yet. Here’s how Virgil described grafting in The to the first millennium BCE. Bliss cuts the sticks into Georgics: Humans have always projected neat lengths and binds them We make a deep incision in the tree, our desires, neuroses, and story together. She labels them and And in the solid wood the slip inclose. lines onto trees (the fruit of the puts them in a tote bag. At the The battening bastard shoots again and grows. tree of knowledge, the family end of the day, they’ll go into And, in short space, the laden boughs arise tree, a scion of a wealthy fam- the fridge until the sap starts With happy fruit aspiring to the skies. ily), and the ancients had some to run and it’s time to graft. The mother plant admires the leaves unknown entertaining ideas about how The PLAnt KingDoM 81 grafting worked. The medie- he stepped of the boat from France wearing a silk of these foods grow in Amer- val philosopher Maimonides top hat. He eventually moved west, to Nevada City, ica), Amigo explains, chances explained, “When one species California, and opened a barbershop. are it descends—at least in is grafted upon another, the Nevada County was the heart of California Gold part—from trees brought or branch which is to be grafted Country. When Gillet arrived, the rush of pros- bred by Gillet. “There were lots must be in the hand of a beau- pectors had slowed, and mining operations had of people, but he had the most tiful damsel, whilst a male consolidated—run by big companies that used stuf that stuck. He had the person has disgraceful and high-pressure jets of water to break up rock for- most varieties that turned out unnatural sexual intercourse mations and get at the gold.

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