Grafting apples and reciting poems in Metchosin

This story was originally published in The Westshore newsletter, March, 2022. 

Apples are a source of enduring poetry for Dr. Dan O’Connell. He believes most everyone has an apple in their personal origin story—a deep-rooted memory of a certain taste that transports them instantly to childhood, like a particularly delicious tree found in a neighbour’s yard, or rambling walks through wild forests dotted with apple trees.

I think I’ve always loved apples, but my strongest memory is when I bit into a Macintosh in the first grade, and lost a tooth. At the time it made me feel like an adult: I was capable of losing a tooth all on my own! Silly now, but I carefully folded it in tissue to make sure I could tuck it under my pillow.

On Sunday afternoon I visit O’Connell at an apple-grafting workshop held at Bilston Creek Farm in Metchosin. I ask him about this theory of the origin story, and he walks me around the group of would-be grafters. One woman, from Eastern Europe, recalls the particular taste of apples that grew in her grandmother’s backyard. She doesn’t know the variety, but her face lights up when she thinks of it. Another man talks about using King apples as baseballs; his family growing up was too poor to buy baseballs, but the large, sturdy King apples were plentiful. Someone else recalls the most perfect climbing tree you could ever imagine, that happened to grow the largest apples possible. They didn’t taste great, but were always impressively proportioned.

O’Connell has memories of being a young dad, spending wild afternoons with his three sons traipsing through forgotten apple orchards on Metchosin’s coast. Does he know of any apple poetry, I ask? I shouldn’t be surprised when he begins reciting a poem from across the work table littered with sharp knives, grafting tape, and bundles of scion wood—a section of a branch that has bud tips ready to grow, but not yet pushing out of the bark.

"...But something rustled on the floor, / And someone called me by my name: / It had become a glimmering girl / With apple blossom in her hair / Who called me by my name and ran / And faded through the brightening air…" (Song of the Wandering Aengus, William Butler Yeats)

The purpose of the workshop is to fulfill the mission of the Royal Pomological Society, a bustling society of three people: O’Connell, Derek Wulff, and Jennifer Burgis. They don’t hold meetings, and won’t allow any new members to join because it means they’d have to hold a meeting. They just want to grow great apples.

Every year they host this grafting day to help people preserve a favourite apple onto root stock—or a plum onto a quince root, or a peach onto stone root stock. They’ve planted more than 500 apple trees in Metchosin, trying to keep alive the variety of heritage apples and curious new hybrids like Fiona Hamersley Chambers’ Metchosin apple. That apple is a surprise new version of a Gravenstein apple that came from a seed. What you might not know about apple seeds is they don’t produce the same apple the seed is from. Instead it will be a brand new combination of the seed apple and tree that fertilized it. (With grafting, you know exactly what you’ll get, which is part of the appeal.) Hamsersley Chambers, a farmer at Metchosin Farm, is known for her seed experiments, particularly with potatoes. Any time she sees an apple seed that’s starting to sprout in the core, she’ll chuck it in a house pot and see what grows. That’s where this Metchosin variety came from: one Gravenstein parent—an apple known for being delicious but very bruisable, so they don’t end up in commercial production—and an unknown fertilizer that contributed a thicker skin, making the Metchosin good for storage long into the winter.

O’Connell had brought scion wood from a Gravenstein he came across in Kaslo, BC, which he calls the most exquisite Gravenstein he’s ever eaten.

Participants brought scion wood from their own favourite trees, to propagate more and to share with neighbours. The two worktables were packed with bundles of carefully labeled twigs. There were King apples, Galas, a handful of Cox’s Orange Pippin, some Macintoshes, and an Alexander.

Wulff demonstrated three ways to graft, talking assembled grafters through the most important steps. "The real quest is to get two flat edges so there’s no air between them," he says. And later, "That’s the quest, really, to match up the cambium layers." And then, "one thing that’s important… two things… ah, three things that are important," he interrupts himself as he thinks of more tidbits of advice. Other important things: how to avoid losing a finger while cutting the tongue section of the whip and tongue graft; how to select the right section of scion wood; and how to best match it with root stock.

Metchosin, I learn, has a long history of apple orchards. Back when the area was first being settled by Europeans, Metchosin was the greenbelt. Apples were cultivated for distribution until the railway was established, and the province decided to irrigate the Okanagan, which then became the juggernaut fruit producer in the province.

To this day, between Bilston Farm and William Head Correctional Facility and beyond, Metchosin’s coastline is speckled with ancient apple trees.

Preserving some of this old DNA is one of the things that O’Connell wants to accomplish through the Royal Pomological Society. Real estate prices being so high, a lovely old apple tree has little chance of standing up in the face of a development. But by grafting a few branches onto a new healthy root stock, it can be preserved.

It will take about three years for my little Gravenstein graft to bear any fruit, I’m told. Right now it looks like I taped together two sticks to make a tree (which is exactly what I did). I’ll report back with progress over the next three years to let you know how she tastes.