What Happened to the Backyard Fruit Tree?

There was a big Blackie mango tree in our front yard.

Out back, a large Stringy mango tree, at least until Hurricane Ivan took it out.

A guinep tree grew along the border of our property. At the back was a large tamarind tree.

And my Pappy?

My Pappy had the coconut jelly tree.

Not just a coconut tree.

In my childhood memory, this tree produced the biggest, sweetest jelly coconuts around. Every family probably has a tree they're prepared to defend like this, but I'm standing by Pappy's.

The funny thing is, none of this seemed particularly remarkable at the time.

Drive through rural Jamaica and food could be growing almost everywhere you looked.

Cherry. Grapefruit. Pear. Mango. Breadfruit. Banana.

You noticed what was growing because the landscape itself was part of where food came from.

And everybody seemed to know where things were.

You knew who had mangoes.

You knew which tree had the sweet ones.

You knew when something was coming into season.

There was an entire unofficial food map living in people's heads.

You couldn't just see a tree full of fruit and decide it belonged to the people. 😂

There was an etiquette.

But you could ask.

And sometimes the arrangement was basically:

Sure, you can climb the tree. Just pick some for me while you're up there.

Pretty good deal, really.

The person who owned the tree didn't have to climb it.

You got fruit.

Everybody came down happy.

Especially in rural Jamaica, food also had a way of moving beyond the yard where it grew.

You might see somebody heading down the road with a bunch of bananas to drop off by Mr. Joe.

They weren't necessarily bartering. Nobody was keeping score.

But they might come back later with a crocus bag full of oranges.

Or yam.

Or dasheen somebody had just dug from the yam hill.

Next week it might be something completely different.

You gave from what you had. Somebody else gave from what they had.

Nobody called it a food-sharing network.

It was just how abundance moved.

I think about that now because a yard wasn't only something to look at.

Things grew there.

And not every house had the same things, which was part of what made the whole thing work.

One family had more mangoes than they knew what to do with.

Somebody else had bananas.

Somebody had pear.

Somebody had yam.

At a certain point, the problem wasn't getting enough.

It was figuring out what to do with all of it before it spoiled.

So it moved.

To neighbors. To family. Down the road.

Sometimes something came back.

Sometimes it didn't.

There was no spreadsheet, app or community initiative organizing any of it.

Just:

"Take some before they spoil."

Now so much of our fruit begins in the same place:

the produce section.

Perfect little piles. Stickers. Plastic containers.

Available whether or not anything resembling that fruit could possibly be growing outside where we live.

And honestly?

That's incredible.

Refrigeration, transportation and increasingly connected food systems made it possible to move food enormous distances and made foods that were once highly seasonal or regional available much more widely.

I live in Upstate New York now.

If I want a mango, I don't need to know whose tree is bearing.

Which is fortunate because a mango tree and a Syracuse winter would have some serious disagreements.

I drive to the store.

There might be mangoes sitting there in January while there's snow outside.

That's convenience my childhood backyard couldn't provide.

But every convenience changes something.

When fruit moves from the yard to the supermarket, we don't only change where we get it.

We change our relationship with it.

A supermarket can make a mango feel like a permanent object.

A tree cannot.

A tree has its own schedule.

First there's nothing.

Then blossoms.

Then tiny fruit.

Then everybody starts watching.

And eventually the tree goes from giving you absolutely nothing to behaving as though it has personally accepted responsibility for feeding the entire district.

Mangoes everywhere.

Mangoes ripening inside.

Mangoes being given away.

Mangoes dropping before anybody gets to them.

Mangoes children are already mentally claiming even though they're still very much attached to the tree.

And then?

The season passes.

You wait.

The supermarket is designed around availability.

The tree is designed around time.

I don't think one is automatically better than the other.

But they teach us different things.

Our Stringy mango tree was there until Hurricane Ivan took it out.

It's funny how you can remember a storm partly by what wasn't standing afterward.

And maybe that's what happens when a tree stays in one place long enough.

It becomes a marker.

You remember climbing it.

Sitting under it.

Which branch leaned over the fence.

Who could reach the fruit nobody else could.

How good the mangoes were that year.

I remember Pappy's coconut jelly because no other jelly tasted quite like Pappy's.

At least that's how memory tells it.

The tree becomes part of the geography of childhood.

Not because anybody decided it was important.

It was simply there long enough to become important.

Of course, not everybody has a yard anymore.

Some of us live in apartments. People rent. Families move. Lots can be smaller. And some of us live in places where the weather has very firm opinions about what we're allowed to grow.

Even when we have yards, we often expect something different from them.

Grass.

Shrubs.

Flowers.

Ornamental trees.

Everything neat.

Everything trimmed.

A fruit tree is not always interested in cooperating.

It drops things.

Birds come.

Insects come.

Fruit falls.

Something inevitably gets to the good mango before you do.

A mature fruit tree is less like decoration and more like a roommate with its own agenda.

But sometimes that unruly roommate produces far more food than one household could possibly eat.

And that's when the story gets interesting.

This isn't really about everybody needing to plant a fruit tree.

And it's definitely not about pretending everything about the past was better.

I like being able to buy fruit at the grocery store.

I like that living in New York doesn't mean giving up mangoes until I happen to board a flight somewhere tropical.

But I wonder whether something quietly disappeared when fewer of us got food from the landscape immediately around us.

Knowing what's in season.

Knowing whose tree has the good mangoes.

Knowing when the guineps are ready.

Having something growing in your yard that produces more than you can possibly keep for yourself.

Having a reason to knock on somebody's door.

Maybe you went down the road carrying bananas.

Maybe you came back with oranges.

Maybe there was yam or dasheen in the crocus bag.

Maybe nothing came back that day.

That wasn't really the point.

You gave from what you had.

And eventually, something else made its way around.

That's a different relationship with food than putting something into a shopping cart.

Not necessarily better.

But different.

And worth remembering.

Because sometimes abundance looked like a tree producing far too much fruit.

And sometimes community was simply knowing what to do with the extra.

"Take some before they spoil."

Until next time,
Tami
Founder and Curious Editor
Roots & Rhythms