When we bought our first house nearly ten years ago, one of the things I loved, loved, loved about it was not the beaded curtains in the shower or the swag lights, it was the gigantic Jonathan apple tree in the back yard. This thing had perhaps never been pruned (or at least not in the last 15 years) and was a full-size tree about 30 feet tall and 40 feet wide. It took up half the back yard and was much overgrown (that first summer the branches bent to the ground with fruit, which made mowing a bit difficult), but I started dreaming of pies and apple sauce and lounging in its bountiful shade.
The tree did not disappoint. A couple of heavy restoration prunes brought out the hidden glory in this tree and one particularly bountiful summer we had over 200 pounds of apples. Luckily for us, that was the summer before my son was born and my mother spent Gabriel’s first days making his first food–homemade apple sauce double blended for extra Grandmotherly goodness.
I was sad to leave that tree behind, but knew that apple trees would be part of our next home’s landscape. In a fit of giddy garden lust, Matt & I stayed up one December night researching apple tree varieties. He had his cider book in hand, I had various Cooperative Extension reports on fire blight resistance and preferable root stock for our windy, dry environment. By the end of the evening, Raintree Nursery in Washington was loving us and we had ordered a whopping five apple trees (Ashmead’s Kernel, Honeycrisp, Roxbury Russet, Striped Gravenstein, and Liberty), a Montmorency cherry tree, a Warren pear, and an Italian Prune (plum) tree. Did I mention our lot is slightly smaller than a third of an acre and that I have tons of vegetable garden space built into this landscape already? Or that I also ordered eight grape vines to cover part of the 425 feet of fence line? Or that I have a 25 foot row of raspberries built into the plan as well?
To answer your questions, no, we’re not going to have much turf in this edible landscape and yes, I’m a fruit in more than one sense of the word 
Anyhow, there was one tree missing from my order list and I ordered it today: a Northern Spy. I’ve never tasted a Northern Spy and, compared to some of the other varieties I’ve ordered, it may not be quite as unique or tasty (although I hear it is pretty good). But there’s a story behind this tree that makes it perhaps the most special one of all. In August of 2006, my husband had to go to China for three weeks on business. This was just a few months after my darling daughter, Lily, was born and when she was still prone to bouts of inconsolable screaming for hours at a time.
To say that I called my parents and begged them to come visit is to understate the desperation of my situation. As always, they came through and arrived just a few days after Matt left. One sunny August afternoon, my father and I drove to the local fruit stand to get some of Colorado’s famous Western Slope peaches. After a pleasant lull in conversation, Dad said, “Have you ever had a Northern Spy?”
At the time, I had no idea that this was a fruit, let alone an apple, and was wondering if we were talking old army stories here, or a mixed drink (unlikely, knowing my father), or what. Then he told me it was an apple that he had eaten as a boy and he wondered if anyone still grew it. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but that story has come to have a great deal of meaning to me because Dad passed away very unexpectedly just over a month after this conversation. Had Matt not taken the trip, I would have missed the opportunity to spend one last week with my father, and would have missed out on this one final story of his boyhood in Pennsylvania.
So I ordered a Northern Spy from Seeds of Change today and will plant it next month in honor of my Dad. And hopefully, several years for now, it will bear fruit. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing eating that fruit will be pretty sacred around here, regardless of whether it’s as floral as the Ashmead’s Kernel, or makes as good a cider as the Roxbury Russet.
