Free Nocturne by Helen Humphreys

like that apple trees are all individuals, that no two trees are alike, and even if a seed from one apple is planted, the tree that grows from that seed will not have exactly the same apples as the first tree. It is endlessly possible to make new varieties of apples by grafting one variety onto the rootstock of another, or even by grafting one variety onto a branch of another, so that the branch will grow one type of apple and the rest of the tree will grow another.
    I like that there are all these old lost orchards in southern Ontario. Sometimes there is only a single tree remaining, and sometimes, as here, there are several trees, each growing a different variety of apple. I can graft pieces of the old trees onto my new trees and, in that way, preserve some of the old species,even though the new apples that grow will not be completely the same as the old.
    But grafting is about bringing something back, keeping something alive, moving the essence of something from one place to another, from one
body
to another.
    Down the river from my cottage, out past habitation, in the wild part that resembles the everglades, a single apple tree hangs over the water. It produces a fruit that is related to a Snow apple at the end of September. The field behind the tree is a tangle of bushes and brambles, with no sign of a building, and yet once there must have been an old farmhouse there, someone must have planted that apple tree with other apple trees, and those trees would have been part of the fruit source for that family. Early apples for eating. Late apples for cider and sauce.
    The spring after you died I took a couple of grafting courses, because I want to wander out in the world and find these old trees, bring pieces of them back to my young orchard and grow new fruit that tastes of the old fruit.
    I like the laws of grafting:
    When planting a whip grafted onto rootstock, always bury the graft so that the new tree doesn’t have to spend energy trying to protect it
.
    Protect the graft because it is vulnerable. New growth is vulnerable, and will burn or freeze first
.
    Never graft into a colder season
.
    An orchard is an assembly, a community. The trees produce fruit at different times, but they are united in their common purpose, and they rely on one another. Many fruit trees require others of their species for cross-pollination. In this way, perhaps, an orchard is a conversation among the various trees. The trees, although single entities, are always in relation to one another. A conversation. A family.
    There’s a choreography to an orchard. Over time, some of the trees in an orchard will have died due to disease or age, and new ones will have been planted in their place. Or, the orchardist might have removed certain trees in favour of other ones that are more suited to growing there. The family of a friend had a peach orchard in Niagara for generations, but they ripped it out in favour of planting cherry trees because they could make more money from running a pick-your-own cherry orchard than they could from selling peaches.
    An orchard is a society, but an orchard is also a place—a temple, an orchestrated wildness, a space made by humans that doesn’t look human. The way an orchard is planted and re-planted becomes aconversation, not just among the trees, but across the generations of people who tend the orchard. The new owners of an orchard act in response to the decisions made by former owners. Orchards are always full of wildlife. The fruit attracts birds and insects and squirrels, raccoons and deer. An orchard offers itself equally to the air and to the earth.
    The grandfather we never knew, Dad’s father, who died in the war, shot down in a Wellington bomber over the Mediterranean one March night on his way to take control of an airbase in Malta at the age of forty-five (the same age you were when you died)—he always wanted to have an orchard. He had been called out of retirement to fly this one last mission, but his