22.5.24 – ancestral discourse through the medium of pear trees, & muddled kale seed
in the garden
I finally planted the pear tree. I should have planted it months ago, before the bare root season ended, but the landscaping in the front garden wasn’t finished. It’s been living in a pot in the back garden since March, becoming a favoured jumping-off point for the blue tits. Now it lives at the very front of the front garden, where I hope the blue tits will find it again when it’s surrounded by climbing beans and sunflowers.
In the UK this variety is known as Williams Bon Chretien, an old English dessert cultivar that is popular to grow but doesn’t store well. In the US and Canada, it’s called a Bartlett pear. I’m growing it because my grandfather recalled eating it as a child, from the orchard of his Italian immigrant grandparents, and thought it was the best pear he’s ever had in his life. He told me so two years ago, after I did a small tour of the graves of my maternal family to lay some herbs from my garden and clean their stones. (I wrote about the experience back in the Tinyletter days.) It was his paternal grandparents who kept the orchard, as well as a vineyard for making their own wine, all in the back garden of their house in West Springfield, Massachusetts. His maternal grandparents were also Italian immigrants, but poorer and not so well educated; they did not have an orchard or a vineyard, but around their small home on the other side of town they grew their own beans to dry and kept chickens.
I have thought of both sets of grandparents often in the years since I immigrated to Scotland. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been, a hundred years ago, to voluntarily leave everything you’ve ever known and not even have video chat to ease the homesickness. My grandfather’s maternal grandmother was 18 and illiterate when she immigrated on her own; his paternal grandfather immigrated in 1909 and was the sole fortunate to go home again to visit his parents, but not until 1923. I want to know how they felt the homesickness in their bodies, if it was the way I feel it too; if they ever felt overwhelmed years later by having chosen to leave; if they ever felt like it was a different person entirely who had made the journey.
Sometime in the next year or so, all being well, I will become a British citizen. My own mixed thoughts on what it means to be British, versus what it means to already feel Scottish, versus the knowledge that I will always be perceived as foreign with my shifting accent, makes me hungry to know how my immigrant grandparents negotiated their own sense of and loss of identity as Italians. They did everything they possibly could to Anglicise their names and become fast Americans, though their core ways of eating, drinking, and growing fundamentally stayed the same. Sometimes it feels like the only way to have these conversations with them is to grow what they grew, to share this same motion of gardening to feed ourselves and to feel at home: pears to know the sweetness of the Berteras, beans to know the richness of the Polastris.
in the past
The garden has been a sea of yellow all month, as my overwintered kales have flowered their hearts out. Four varieties survived to spring, but I knew I wanted to save the seed of just one, the dwarf green curly kale. Brassicas cross-pollinate very easily so, ideally, I would have cut down the flowers of every variety except the green curlies. But the cavolo nero flowered first, and it felt wrong to deny the bumblebees that source of nectar. I let the cavolo nero continue until enough of the green curlies were flowering before I pulled them out. But then the Pentland Brig began flowering too, and it’s such a massive beast offering so much to so many, it felt almost irresponsible to compost it. Thankfully the green curlies made plenty of seed pods before the Shetland kale flowers could get in the mix; I’ve now gathered the stems of three plants and put them in the rickety old cold frame to dry out. When they’re dry, I’ll crack open the pods to collect the little ball bearings of seed.
The resulting kales will likely not be pure green curlies. I don’t mind; a little cross-pollination feels like a cheeky homage to the kail-seed sellers of the early 19th century. In Appendix D of Patrick Neill’s 1813 report On Scottish Gardens and Orchards, a Mr Archibald Gorrie described the methods of some cottage gardeners in the Carse of Gowrie:
“In the Braes of the Carse, where the soil and climate is favourable for preserving plants of greens and cabbage in winter, the cottagers generally sow what ground they can spare with them in August, and they find a ready market at Perth in the spring months. Many of them also raise kail-seed, which they sell to the nurserymen; but frequently they pay too little attention to this article, planting greens, cabbage, savoys, and plain kail promiscuously in one plot, so that none of the seeds can be depended on as genuine.”
The same Mr Gorrie advised gentlemen-landlords that cottagers should have 40 falls in all for their gardens; a fall (or fa’, faa, faw) was an old Scottish unit of measurement equal to about 5.6 metres, or 18.37 feet. For cottagers with good soil, he recommended 8 falls (44 metres) for growing greens and cabbage for eating, and 1 fall just for the raising of kail and cabbage seed. The resulting seed he estimated to yield about 6 lbs, which could be sold at 2 shillings per pound. Just above in Appendix C, directions from a late Mr Nicol advises that the kale seed be sown in a bed two yards long (1.8 metres) and four feet wide (1.2 metres) around the first of June, and the resultant “three or four hundred planted at fifteen or sixteen inches square on the potato ground without dung, about the middle of July or first of August.”
Three or four hundred! I will aim to plant 10 or so individual kales from now through the autumn, not including the plants that appear self-sown from years past. These, too, are very welcome, being quite hardy little guys. They remind me of a passage from the 1845 Statistical Account for Careston, County of Forfar:
“It may be here further noticed, that, towards the close of last century, a small piece of ground being trenched, adjoining to the castle, but remote from the garden, of itself spontaneously produced a thick crop of curly, or German green plants. Before this, the above ground had been uncultivated time out of mind, so that the seed of these plants must have remained a very long period dormant in the earth.”