CULTURE
Life in an Espalier
By Kevin Johnson
Remember those little puzzles you held in your hands? The object was to move the tiles one-by-one until they made a picture. I hated those things. Life gets like that for me sometimes.
Gardening provides me therapeutic relief from all that complexity out there. After a long commute on the el, or a forty minute wait at the DMV to renew my license, I come home with one thought in mind: I need to garden. It calms my soul.
I tried therapy once. I tried to explain to the counselor how life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness left me with no wiggle room. Have a kid, buy a dog -- or a goldfish for that matter -- and even the simplest of vacations is compromised. We go through this every time we travel. The car is gassed up, luggage packed, maps in the glove compartment and DVD movies in back for the kids. We’re ready to get on the road.
“Did you find a sitter for the cat?”
“I thought you had it covered?”
I could be in a counselor’s office for weeks, angry, not with the wife or kids, but at life.
The problem with life is that everything's connected. Like dominos stacked too close together. You can't move one without affecting everything else. Cholesterol counts, glucose levels, salt intake. It seems you can't have a cheeseburger just for the simple pleasure of eating ground beef on a Kaiser bun anymore.
Gardens used to help me ignore the interconnectivity
of things. But recently my wife and I took a trip to the Chicago Botanic Gardens
where that changed, at least in one small way. The man conducting the tour
was wearing the khaki shorts, olive shirt and volunteer badge of the Chicago
Botanical Gardens so I assumed he knew what he was talking about.
With great excitement, he was showing off the Botanical Garden’s apple
trees. The trunks were knuckled like one expects of apple trees, but unusually
bent into large diamond patterns.
“They’re all bent,” I said, ever the keen observer.
“It’s the way you are supposed to grow fruiting trees in a limited space. They are called espaliers. We grow them in a special structure so the limbs are flat on both sides and get more sunlight. If you grow them right, you can actually get more fruit off these trees than those growing in the open air.”
Frankly, I thought the trees were ugly. They looked like bony angles of bent elbows and knees. A stunted criss-crossing mess.
“But they’re all bent,” I said, thinking he hadn’t heard me.
“That’s what gives the espalier its full trunk length, and keeps the tree healthy,” he said. He walked on and the rest of us followed.
“Yeah, but they’re all bent.” I whispered to my wife.
She just shrugged and walked along with the others. “Espalier,” she said under her breath like Kane calling for Rosebud. “We should try one.”
Now I’m all for making form out of function, but this espalier was going overboard. That, of course, did not deter my wife from convinced me to try one in “the limited space” of our own back yard. If we grew our plant in an espalier instead free-standing, we could use it to cover a bothersome flat garage wall that faced into the garden.
An espaliered plant is one that has been trained to grow in one plane—flat. In the 17th century, ‘espalier’ originally referred to the frame or trellis on which the plant was trained. Today, espalier refers to both the two-dimensional tree or shrub and the horticultural technique of actually training the plant.
To make our espalier feel at home, I built a simple framing rectangle of pressure treated pine and attached small eye hooks every two feet. I laced 1/8” cable in a crisscross diamond pattern to support the vines. The whole thing cost under forty bucks and took only half a morning to make. I attached it to the side of the garage with deck screws. Espalier—done.
We have planted ivy in our garden before and it turned out to be easy and fast growing so we decided to fill our espalier with a variegated porcelain vine called “Elegans.” It gives a nice Fall showing for a garden because it blooms from late summer to early autumn. My wife and I both had Elegans in our gardens when we were growing up, and we both remember how the creamy white flowers give way to beautiful porcelain blue fruits that ripen to a brilliant royal purple. Elegans are hardy plants, suitable to our climate zone and will grow between 10 to 25 feet tall so covering our garage wall would not be a problem.
We decided to buy only a small quantity of plants, maybe to save money and maybe just to lessen our disappointment should our espalier fail. We planted four branches, watered and fertilized, but, most of all, we gave it positive thoughts. We checked it every day. Every trip to the garage yielded some new information on a twist or turn our plants had taken.
The vines rooted quickly and grew in two directions, first branching away from their center and then back again to connect. On a good day early in the season, with cool nights and bright sun, a stalk might twist and curl its way to grow a full inch. On bad days, in this year’s unusually hot August, there was nothing.
Some plants arched for the sky stretching their curling tendrils so far you’d find a single leaf growing alone on long inches of stalk. Other plants bunched their leaves at the center. Some plants did both. Two mismatched stalks grew unevenly as if they were from two different plants. Now this should have freaked me out. Instead I found myself, forgive the pun, rooting for them.
With an espalier, what you begin with is, at best, patchy and misshapen. You find yourself wishing that the reaching limbs would fill and that the clustering stalks would stretch. What you want is evenness. A thick and complete plant that shows both health and design. But that only comes with time.
It’s not hard to make an analogy here. My daughters once constantly demanded to be picked up; now they have to be harassed to give their old man a hug. The house that took five agents, two inspectors, and every saved penny to buy now is a beloved home. It all evens out.
In one season we went from a bare and ugly, vinyl-clad garage wall to beautiful, intertwining organic life. Birds nested in its crooks, bees pollinated its flowers, and at night fireflies lit its variegated leaves. But I know that buried in that foliage are those little guide wires, so obvious at first but now hidden, giving the plant it secret shape and direction.
The tour guide said, “A plant which has been espaliered correctly is a real work of art. Much patience, skill and creativeness is necessary for a successful project.”
All we have to do now is just hang in there, and keep thinking good thoughts.
