Orchards

What’s still green: Juniper, arborvitae and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, yucca, prickly pear, honeysuckle, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, yellow evening primrose, blue and yellow flax, oriental poppy, sea lavender, sea pink, winecup, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, catmint, fern-leaf yarrow, tansy, senecio, Mount Atlas daisy, Mexican hat, anthemis, chrysanthemum, black-eyed Susan, purple aster, some grasses.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum, Silver King artemisia.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, white and coral beardtongues, pink evening primrose.
What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, rochea.
Animal sightings: Bird with chalky blue back around front porch last Sunday; rabbit tracks in snow Wednesday morning.
Weather: First snow Tuesday, along with first major power outage since the Thanksgiving fiasco a few years back; 8:24 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: The first thing my furnace man asked last week was "Did you get any fruit?" When I had someone up from Santa Fe, he noticed the catalpa, but this tradesman, like any true son of the rio arriba, saw the peach and wanted to know.
Small talk in the valley has its own rhythms. I asked after the apples and he said the only ones who’d gotten much were in Los Alamos.
This would be a hard year if we still followed the old ways that depended on dried or stored apples for food and fresh ones for cash in the fall. The spring cold spells coincided with blossoming times, and I only saw fruit on a few trees in the 24 orchards I routinely drive by.
Most of the orchards have seen better days. Belle Becker says her family sold apples on the highway to Taos to people who came from Texas to fill their trucks until "the deep freeze in the 70's." That’s back when Emilio Naranjo was at the height of his political power in the county. Now, many have gaps where trees have died and not been replaced. A few are used for parking, but some are still carefully maintained, the grounds plowed or mowed, the branches pruned, the fruit picked. One paints the trunks white, another puts plastic collars made from empty plant containers around the bases.
Commercial apples are relatively recent. When Francisco Domínguez visited the area in 1776, he noticed only peaches and apricots. But, by 1830, Josiah Gregg saw trees around Santa Fe grown from pips that had come north. The Santa Clara bought the small, thin-skinned yellow mansanà from Mexican peddlers and used them to seed small orchards. These manzanas méxicanas were growing in Chimayó when Don Unser’s grandmother, Benigna Ortega Chávez, was a child early in the twentieth century and seen in Santa Cruz in the 1930's.
Change came with the railroads. Not only did the Denver and Rio Grande open markets for local farmers, but the transcontinental lines provided a distribution network for Clarence Stark, who began promoting his Delicious in 1895 by sending free samples with mail orders. By 1900, those saplings had begun to bear, and people wanted the sweet, five-pointed fruit from his Missouri-grown bare roots.
A revived knowledge of pomology probably filtered south from Denver where Stark had been treated for tuberculosis in 1887. While there he established dryland orchards and made promotional trips, including some to Mormons, who’d brought their apple growing techniques from the east. Whipple wrote in 1914 that the apple industry was still comparatively young in New Mexico and expanding the most around Farmington. Delicious wasn’t yet among the common varieties.
The seedling Jesse Hiatt found in Iowa near his Yellow Bellflower tree around 1870 was probably just reaching the Rio Grande when Naranjo was born in Guachupangue in 1916. Mrs. Chávez remembers her father, Reyes Ortega, and Santos Ortiz brought the first manzanas americanas to Chimayó from Sombrillo. By the time Naranjo was in high school in Santa Fe in the 1930's, Red Delicious and its pollination partners, Jonathan and Winesap, had become the most important varieties in Santa Cruz.
There are no orchards left along the Taos highway at my end of town, and only a few places in the village have trees. The land in the one has turned commercial, that near the church was always too valuable for farming. Arboleroas were kept to the periphery there, like they were in Chimayó, where trees were banished to life outside the plaza.
Some of the early plantations were ambitious. The largest one today is six rows of 32 trees suggesting an original plan for 192. The other large plantings look like they were 6 by 20 and 6 by 16. More orchards are two or four rows wide and six trees deep, one to two dozen trees. When hard cash came from men like Naranjo’s father, Alejandrino, who worked the mines and smelters of Colorado, these were sizable investments.
Such abundance must have become not only a symbol of economic comfort in bad times, but also such a mark of success that people still buy a half dozen trees for their much-reduced lots. Dwarf trees a 92-year-old man can maintain without a ladder are planted in three rows in a fenced plot to the right of Naranjo’s home. When he died a few weeks ago, he may have outlived the traditional life that formed him and the political machine he built, but his trees, like all the orchards in the area, are outliving him. Next year, people may ask his heirs if they got any fruit.
Notes:Becker, Belle. Interviewed by Kevin Huelsmann for "The Villages of Española," Rio Grande Sun, 29 May 2008. Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez, 1956.Gregg, Josiah. Commerce of the Prairies: Life on the Great Plains in the 1830's and 1840's, 1844, republished by The Narrative Press, 2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
Terry, Dickson. "The Stark Story," Missouri Historical Society, The Bulletin, Sept 1966.US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.Usner, Don J. Sabino’s Map: Life in Chimayó’s Old Plaza, 1995.
Whipple, O. B. "Apple Growing in the Western Mountain States" in Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 1914.
Photograph: Small apple orchard near the village, 7 December 2008.