I have two apple orchards, one consisting of 150, the other 120 trees, principally grafted fruit: Roxbury Russet, R.I. Greening, Esopus Spitzenburg, Pearmain, Newtown Pippin, Baldwin, Black Gillyflower, Jonathan, Fall Pippin, Honey Heart, Swaar, Harvest, Priestly, &c.
Peach trees, 52: Alberge Yellow, Morris White, Early Ann, Royal George, Early York, Early Crawford, Lemon Cling, &c. Pear trees, 39, including Belle, Barlett, Virgalieu, Swan’s Orange, Woodruff, Harvest, &c. Plum trees, 29, including Damson, Greengage, Yellow Egg, Mediterranean, Large Purple &c. Also 33 cherry trees: Tartarian, English, Florence, American Amber, Morelio, &c. 12 large Orange Quince bushes; Apricots, Isabella grapes, &c.
The curculio has troubled my plums some seasons. The pear trees are affected by blight, which I fear will prove destructive; I know of no effectual preventive.
From Transactions of the New York State Agricultural Society for the Year 1848, Elam Bliss’s response to the questionnaire about his farm in Westfield, Chautauqua County
chapter 14
A Glass House
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This Elam Bliss had been Dulcy’s great-grandfather, and all of the trees except the blighted pears, immediately replaced, were still bearing fruit when she was a child in the house of his elderly son, another barrel-chested botanic obsessive. Dulcy had a list of everything that she and Martha had picked in the Westfield gardens tucked in the green book, and she looked at it now with a new eye. Pearmain and Baldwin, both cider apples, ripened too late for Montana. So did Spitzenberg and Black Gilliflower, a smoky, ribbed apple that had been one of Dulcy’s favorites, along with Swaar, rich and spicy and mottled green, the ugliest fruit in the orchard. Swan’s Orange had been Walton’s favorite pear, on his summer visits, but the Virgalieu pear, known these days as White Doyenne, had been far better.
Martha, Elam’s daughter-in-law, had taught Dulcy to make a checkered tart with the damson and greengage plums, to make apple butter and chutney, and cider and brandies out of everything. Dulcy spent late summers with a face smeared by syrup from Moorpark apricots and mirabelles and mulberries, newer cherries like Black Republican and Bing, blackberries and raspberries and gooseberries the size of quail eggs from bushes with thorns like medieval spikes. Martha grew dessert and wine grapes, but Concord vines increasingly circled Westfield, as the Welch family bought up land for juice and Seder wine. Martha blamed the Welches for an onslaught of plant ailments, but the greatest enemy remained the curculio, a weevil. She’d send Dulcy and a spritzer of poison up into the trees in June, then back up in September with a hooked basket for the survivors. When she was especially annoyed with someone, usually Walton, she’d call him the weevil.
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Dulcy saw nothing like Elam’s orchards in Montana, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be attempted, on a smaller scale, in her own backyard. A week after Henning Falk retrieved his brother and disappeared again, she purchased a ruler, draughtsman’s paper, and good pencils at Sax & McCue, and spent an evening reading new gardening magazines and sketching.
To order & start inside: tomatoes, peppers, aubergine, melons, artichokes
To plant outside, April: lettuces, parsley, beets, carrots, turnips, celery, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, peas, onions, radishes, potatoes
To plant when warm (last frost when?): beans, squash, cucumber, corn, cosmos, nasturtiums
To order: fruit trees & berries
The next morning she walked to the new house in another snowstorm, nothing soft and ethereal but a fat fog laced with crystals that stuck to her face and melted down her neck. She’d wanted to plan out terraced beds, but she couldn’t see more than ten feet, nor could she study the shade patterns or determine if any corner of the yard had soil that was any better than the center, where the wind had scoured enough snow away to show dead gray clay.
Inside, progress: Dulcy had hired one non-Slovak, a painter and paper-hanger named Gustaf Goulliand recommended by the Sacajaweas, and chosen a buttery off-white except for the largest bedroom, for which she picked a sort of apricot, and the small library room, which became sea blue-gray-green, almost the same color as Walton’s travel notebook.
Margaret described the former owner’s wife as likeable but odd. She’d hated the local climate—she’d emerged rarely, usually wearing a fur coat—and the white tiles were the result of her obsession with cleanliness. Margaret surmised that this fixation on soap and disease had led to the woman’s committal to a sanitarium in her home state. Dulcy knew the kind of institution, deceptively homey in its public rooms—lots of light and potted plants—but more like a hospital proper in the treatment areas, with gray marble walls and floors and nurses in love with their own starched uniforms, advertising quantities of grain and oxygen, baths, electricity, and Swedish movements. Walton would love the experience for a week, and then flee for dirt.
“The view of the river depressed her,” said Margaret. They were on the porch a few days later, talking about what cane furniture to purchase, and Siegfried Durr was tromping on the ceiling above their heads, measuring for new upstairs windows.
“But it’s beautiful,” said Dulcy, flummoxed. You could see rivers and mountains, sky, and none of the town. It stunned her: she’d bought the place without ever looking up and out.
“She found it bleak; she was quite morbid. She said it was the same thing, every day.”
“I can see feeling that way about the wallpaper,” said Dulcy. “But everything here is moving. The river, the wind and clouds and trees.”
“I think she had the sense that the water was constantly disappearing,” said Margaret.
As opposed to the goddamn wallpaper. Dulcy had her own bleak thoughts, watching Goulliand struggle with a steamer and a scraper, the shadow of purple roses holding on like a rotten body. “Should we give up on the idea of paint?”
“No,” he said. He tended to grit his teeth. The hair and beard she’d initially assumed were gray were speckled with whitewash, and his nails were permanently copper green.
“Can I do anything to make your life easier?”
“You could leave the room, Mrs. Nash. I would suffer more comfortably if alone.”
Margaret fled. Dulcy walked into her kitchen and slammed empty drawers on her way out to the side porch and her bag and downtown, where she could throw some money at the empty-drawer problem. She found Durr on a ladder and Margaret underneath, holding a putty pot. Three panes had been cracked when a plasterer swung wide with a board.
“You’re a man of many talents,” said Dulcy.
“I am a man of two or three,” he said. He’d started a black beard, and he had a new cane tilted against the bench by her boots, silver clad with a blue glass ball at the end.
He had all his weight on his left leg and was dangling his right on the ladder. “Did you hurt your leg falling from a window?”
“From a horse, in the army. I crushed it, and that was the end of that.”
“The army?”