August 12, 2020
Plum trees are my topic this time. Specifically, the ciruelo, which bears sour, tannic fruit, and is quite widely planted round here. And mostly, I hate it.
When my friends and I came to this property to build our houses, the ayudante, the village administrator, was not an accommodating person. He insisted that, unlike our neighbours, we had to put a wall around our property. And on my side, right in front of where I was building my house, there was a ciruelo that I was told was not to be cut down nor harmed. The species is valued here, and protected by law. So he said, anyway.
A lot of people round here like the fruit when it’s in season. I never have, being used to a fleshier, juicier type of plum. But the taste of the things isn’t one of the things that bother me about it.
First off, it produces fruit with a large stone, especially in proportion to the small size of the plums. The tree is prolific, so that every year a large number of stones fall to the ground, and they don’t go away. They just hang around being round and wrinkly, for years.
Then, once my house was finished, I realised the tree in front of it was prolific with its branches. It blocked the light, and it kept on blocking ever more. Soon, I transgressed the ayudante’s injunctions, and began cutting off individual branches, so that on a morning after a rainstorm, I wouldn’t have to walk out into a bunch of wet leaves. The branches come out at quite low levels, and since the tree emerges from ground a couple of feet below the front entrance, I always had to duck. Eventually, my surgical removal of small branches became a cutting of larger limbs and, a times, a frustrated tearing away of new twigs.
The offending tree, with the house behind it trying to peek through its branches.
The tree wasn’t bothered. Every year, it replaced what I’d chopped or torn off, then spread a little more. The house became gloomier as it expanded its limbs over the full front. I never wanted to attract the ayudante’s wrath or that of his successors, but I’ve often wondered if anyone would really have noticed if it met with (say) an unfortunate ‘lightning strike’ that necessitated its removal by bow-saw one weekend. Or, had succumbed to gradual poisoning by other methods.
But I returned to Toronto for a period in 2015, and didn’t follow through. Since late 2018, I’ve lived in the second house on the property, 25 feet away, where I thought the ciruelo couldn’t annoy me. However, I noticed last week that with the rains, it was starting to obstruct the stairs down to the gate with its latest foliage. I’ve tugged off a few branches, but they seem to grow back in days.
Somebody planted ciruelo orchards round here years ago, though most don’t seem to be tended any more. Our local flora is mostly sub-tropical or (we’re quite high up) temperate, so they add an element that doesn’t belong in the traditional landscape; and standing in spaced groups, they create a strange, un-Mexican atmosphere. Walking through such an orchard, I expect a hobbit or some similar Tolkienian being to emerge from behind a tree, and start a conversation about orcs, or having cucumber sandwiches for tea. Their trunks are nearly black, and their twisting limbs seem like something out of a fairy story. They’re atmospheric, for sure, and in that way, attractive.
A black trunk with twisting limbs: a ciruelo near to my house.
But in having to deal with one this close to where I live, I easily find the attraction dissipates. One of these days, in a black enough mood, I might just resort to full-on arbicide. (Yes, that is a word). The plumstones will no doubt take years to disappear, since there’s always another one ready to roll in and replace any I remove. But mine enemy shall be slain, and only the relentless indigenous vegetation will remain to overrun the paths and stairs on the property.
The hour cometh, I tell you.
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