pendragon orchard and vine

It’s the classic social-media reflex: someone posts a leaf with a wrinkle, and five seconds later a stranger hollers leaf curl! as if pronouncing a curse.

Long after apples are gone and pears are stored away, the medlar still hangs—brown, frost-touched, and waiting. It’s a fruit that sweetens only after the cold, a reminder that not everything worth tasting comes in season.

Every olive carries history in its roots — Athens crowned with Athena’s gift, Noah reading the branch as landfall, empires rising and falling while the trees still bore fruit. To plant one here is to graft that long memory into Northwest soil, a wager that what endured for millennia might endure again.

America’s biggest crop isn’t corn or wheat. It’s grass — and it’s complicit in cooking the planet. Here’s how we fix it without killing the lawn.