On the coldest days, out come the gardening books for a little dreaming. I’m also searching on line and in catalogues for apple trees.  In Italy, we adore our twisted and leaning old fruit trees, and the upright orchard we planted five years ago.  I’m especially fond of the pomegranates and plums. When I’m picking pears for my tart, apricots that look like sunrise, or crabapples to garnish a plate, I’m thrilled.

We have bought a farm here in North Carolina that has walnuts and pecans but not a single fruit tree. We have old cedars everywhere.  Right away, my neighbor mentioned that they’re a disaster for apple trees, just what I want to plant.  The centenarian cedars are full of dead limbs and look terribly scraggly up close, though from a distance they punctuate the landscape and appear quite at home. An allée of them leads to a house that no longer exists. I don’t have the heart to chop them down.  As if one problem tree were not enough, we have walnuts as well.  Grand black walnuts, shady and venerable. They too are poor neighbors.  The roots send out something noxious called “juglone,” which goes for the jugular apparently, strangling the systems of most every plant you’d want to plant.  Nothing to be done there; I’m not cutting them out either. Hostas are impervious and although that’s not my favorite plant, we have hostas.

Some varieties of apples resist this cedar-apple fungus that one website describes as causing “sticky orange lesions.”  I must choose two of the stalwart varieties for pollination and they have to bloom at the same time.  This requires research and I’m not sure of the taste of some of these resistant trees because I’ve never heard of Zestar, Milton, Runkel, Sansa, Jerseymac and the others.  Any recommendations? Meanwhile, my local grocery store has a selection of twenty types.  I’m munching through them one by one.  By early March, I’ll be armed with knowledge and planting my little orchard.

Reading about apples reminds me this morning of a special fruit arboretum in Umbria, near Città di Castello.  I describe it my new book Every Day in Tuscany:

Among the charms of the upper Tiber valley is Archeologia Arborea. The late Livio dalla Ragione collected rare varieties of fruit trees from abandoned farms, monastery and convent cloisters and orchards. With his daughter, Isabella, who carries on the work, he started an arboretum in San Lorenzo di Lerchi, just outside Città. The trees survive not only as themselves but as a remembrance of an earlier way of life. The Clogmaker’s Fig reminds us that the fig wood used to be preferred for making farmer’s clogs. When the farmers left the land, the tree almost disappeared. Peasant’s Steak Pear speaks for itself.

You can walk the orchard in the warm months, make friends with the Little Convent Apple, Goose Cherry, Giant Fig of the Zoccolanti Friars, Icicle Pear, Small Bloody Peach, Drunken Apple, Ox Muzzle Apple, Pink Stone Apple, Little Fox Pear and many more. The names seem to contain old tastes: Pink Strawberry Apple, Chestnut Apple, Butter Pear, Lemon Apple, and Cinnamon Pear.

If you adopt a tree, you are entitled to its harvest. The proviso, however, requires you to leave three fruits—one for the sun, one for the earth, and one for the tree itself.  This sounds like something Saint Francis of Assisi could have written. Che vita, what a life, to dwell among these fruit trees.

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