Grafters X Change Year 1 -- Branches and Networks

The rapid onset of climate change has created urgent conditions where traditional First Nations’ agricultural and permacultural practices could once again play an important role in North American food systems.

Crops managed by First Nations often showed a great deal of phenotypic diversity, enabling adaptation to a wide range of growing conditions that might be experienced over long time spans. For example, corn varieties (maize) cultivated by southwestern peoples for millennia, can appear quite different in a drought year versus a wet year, as the diverse gene pool can express physical characteristics contingent on environmental conditions as well as show a range of morphologies within a given season, as a kind of genetic backup plan. This adaptive heterogenicity was clearly regarded as desirable by first peoples, as it reduced the likelihood of total crop failure and was maintained in the gene pool, in polar opposite to the way plants are bred in agro-business today, which emphasizes consistency in form and yield. (See Raoul Robinson’s ‘Return to Resistance’)

The growing of fruit trees is no exception. Modern-day orchards are grown on a small variety of rootstocks that confer uniform dwarfing characteristics to expedite mechanical harvesting, to resist known diseases and to produce consistently in a narrow range of environmental conditions manipulated by irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. Compare this with the traditional first people’s cultivation of crabapple (Malus fusca) along the Pacific coast of North America. This species, still esteemed by tribes in the region for the small but easily preserved fruit, is a part of an ancient Beringian flora that made its way across the land bridge and is now native from Alaska to California. It is highly adapted to conditions that would be impossible for most commercial varieties, tolerating saltwater inundation, soggy and cool maritime climate and yet also summer drought. Malus fusca forms a natural guild with salmonberry Rubus spectabilis, often germinating in the berry’s thorny thickets which protect saplings from browsing by ungulates. It varies considerably in growth form and fruit size and groves exhibiting desirable characteristics still mark the sites of ancient habitation up and down the West Coast, where they were once carefully tended in conjunction with root gardens and bivalve mariculture. Though an important food crop for aboriginal people, Malus fusca also plays a vital role in the nonhuman ecosystem, its flowers producing nectar for insects, its fruits a favourite of birds and many mammals.

Malus fusca also makes a highly resilient rootstock for Eurasian apple varieties and confers some of its resilient qualities to the scions, allowing merchantable orchards to be grown in what would otherwise be marginal conditions. This has the added benefit of not impairing the ecological functionality of the host tree in its biome.

But why stop at crabapples? It turns out several native and naturalized woody plants such as hawthorn (Crateagus) and Mountain ash (Sorbus) make good rootstocks for popular fruits with the decided advantage of already being adapted to the landscape. They can be maintained without fencing if grafts are attached above the browse line, allowing deer and other ungulates access to fulfill their ecological roles, consuming fallen fruit, depositing their valuable manure and keeping grass nibbled down under the trees as they would in natural woodland. Such ‘hyper’ orchards serve to add functionality to an existing ecological community, adding a layer to what is already present rather than excluding or trying to replace it through intensive inputs of energy and material.

In my workshop on ‘Decolonizing the Orchard’, I join local practitioners in identifying opportunities for this kind of botanical partnering here in the postcolonial landscape of the Northeast, demonstrating some simple grafting techniques and tips on winter plant identification.

— Oliver Kellhammer