Living: Of Apple Trees and Roses

"Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would continue to plant my apple trees." That is the statement of faith traditionally attributed to Martin Luther. Some skeptic recently challenged the world of scholarship to demonstrate exactly where Luther had ever made such a declaration, and nobody could find an exact source. Perhaps, like so many such pieties, the idea really came from Goethe. Or perhaps Thoreau. It does not greatly matter, for the statement itself is one of abiding hope and abiding truth.

Consider for a moment the blessings of the apple tree. First of all, it is beautiful, not with the upright pride of the pine or maple but with a gnarled and twisted strength that implies the stoic wisdom of many gales survived. And it flowers every spring, with a glowing white fragrance that attracts the inquiries of the honeybee. Once its leaves are out, it provides shelter for the larks and thrushes that sing from its branches. In due time, the fading flowers turn into apples, offering a thousand fulfillments: apple pie, apple cake, applesauce, apple cider, apple butter, apple jelly, apple dumplings, apple tarts, apple pandowdy. Cut into pieces, the apple tree can be carpentered into a table, or at the least its kindlings will give off a splendid flame. Left quite alone, the tree will blossom white again next spring.

Arnold Schoenberg, trying to explain why George Gershwin had been a natural composer, said that a true artist is like an apple tree, and when he feels the need, he bursts into flower without ever thinking about the market price of apples. Conversely, it would seem that an apple tree is a work of art, a rhapsody in green and white. And it grows -- this is the miracle -- from a little brown seed no more than half an inch long, of which there are half a dozen inside every apple core that you throw into the garbage pail.

Like Martin Luther (or somebody) -- richly aware that the world might end tomorrow -- I keep planting apple seeds and watching to see how they grow. Some never germinate at all, some pop up about an inch and then slowly shrivel. But there stands outside my window one apple tree that was once a seed and is now more than twice as tall as I am. All it took me to grow it was about 15 years of my life.

Almost every time I look at that tree, I say to myself one of the things that a man most wants to say: "I made that." I know this is not really true. God made it. Or it made itself. But I helped. I planted the seed in the ground. I watered it. I watched over it and admired its blind, thrusting determination to be and to grow. And that is all most of us can do for most of the things or the people we care about.

Like many gardeners, I am rather a bungler. I know very little about pH soil tests. I think I know how to prune a rosebush, but the rosebush may think otherwise. I learned from my father the basic rules of mulching and thinning -- how to stake out the tomatoes, how to make the peas climb up the chicken wire, how to bind up the raspberries -- but the techniques that worked in the fertile hills of Vermont do not necessarily work in the sands of Long Island. Most important of all, I do not have the time (or the energy) to play some character out of Tolstoy. I live by the 8:26 to Penn Station, and most of the time, my roses grow untended.