A Road Made of Roots: Notes on Wild Apples, Design, and Inheritance

I found the tree four years ago, in mid-September, on a morning that smelled of cold brine and fermenting leaves. 

I’d just dropped my daughter, Grace, at school in Eastsound. The light was thin, the kind that makes color seem more deliberate—gray sky, gold grass, the dull brass of alder leaves turning. I was halfway back to the truck when something caught my eye: a soft yellow glow from the ditch that runs along the road, half-lost behind a snarl of blackberry and hawthorn. Somehow, I’d never noticed it before. 

At first I thought it was light reflecting off water, but then I saw the shape. Apples—small, pale, each one giving off that soft matte gleam that tells you they’re real fruit, not an ornamental. I walked to it. 

The tree was in bad shape: tall, narrow, bark rough and darkened, fighting for air in a tangle of competing growth. A typical seedling—spindly, unpruned, doing its best to stay vertical. I could smell the fruit before I touched it, a clean, floral sharpness like honey cut with rain. I pushed through the hawthorn and stood under the canopy. The ground was littered with apples, some bruised, some still perfect. I leapt for one just out of reach.

It was small, firm, and cool in my hand. The skin was thin and lightly russeted, the kind of surface that doesn’t photograph well but usually holds promise. I brought it to my nose—there it was again, that perfume. Then I bit in.

Overripe fruit from the Eastsound seedling apple, gathered in October. The skin has turned soft gold and freckled, the flesh still fragrant with the same balance of acid and sweetness that first revealed its promise.

Balanced. Not the forced balance of a bred variety, but a natural one—acid and sugar so even they seemed to cancel each other out and leave only clarity. The flesh was white, almost cream, moderate grain, crisp but eager to yield. I took another bite and kept chewing. The aftertaste was honey and clean water. 

I filled my shirt with apples. 

When I got back to the school, I handed them out—to teachers, parents, anyone standing nearby. Everyone agreed it was something special, but no one knew where the tree had come from. No nearby orchard, no obvious graft union, no second tree for pollination. It was alone.

That winter I went back with pruners. The tree had survived another stormy season, scarred but alive. I cut scion wood from the straightest young shoots, each about the thickness of a pencil, and wrapped them in damp paper for storage. I ordered a handful of M111 rootstocks—reliable, deep-rooted, the workhorse of apple propagation—and when they arrived, I matched the cambium, wrapped the grafts tight, and set them to heal.

Most grafts take if you’re careful, but these took with unusual vigor. By midsummer they were pushing straight, green shoots; by fall, one had even set a flower and a single apple. First-year fruiting is rare, almost impolite, but it felt right for this tree. It wanted to live.

Sometime that spring, after the grafts began to push, I called my mother. I told her about the tree, about the flavor, about the small miracle of finding something perfect growing out of a ditch. She listened, then said, “You know, your grandfather did that too.” I needed to hear that.

Her father—my grandfather—had spent much of his life grafting roses and gardening. He bred them, hybridized them, traded cuttings. He also raised angora rabbits and ran a community garden that fed half the town. I never met him, only months old when he died, but I can see him then—out there with a knife, a bundle of cuttings, the same quiet faith that what’s alive can be guided back into coherence.

After that call, I started thinking about how grafting works in a larger sense: the exchange between old and new wood, between what’s fading and what’s coming into strength. You can’t force the union; you can only align the layers and hold them close until the sap decides to agree and cell division occurs. That’s not so different from lineage—family, memory, inheritance. The older I get, the more I see how little of what we do is invention. Most of it is repair.

Seedling apples are common in the San Juans. Early settlers threw their pomace into gullies, and the seeds took. Most of those trees grew into tough, unlovely things, their fruit bitter or sour or mealy, or vengefully tannic. But every so often, one wins the genetic lottery. A tree finds the right balance of sun, soil, and random chance and makes something worth keeping. Almost every variety we now consider “heritage”—Gravenstein, Northern Spy, King—began as one such accident. Someone stopped, tasted, and decided it mattered.

That morning in Eastsound, I became part of that same old process. My mother’s stories of her father and his gardens made it clear: I wasn’t creating anything new. I was restoring the road that leads to myself.

The grafts are still growing here now. They’ve put on good wood, clean buds, and strong unions. The fruit they bear is true to the parent—small, fragrant, and exactly as I remember. Each year I take a few more cuttings, give them to friends, plant them in new soil. The tree that began in a ditch will go on.

Sometimes I visit the original, like today. It’s still there, half-lost in the tangle, still throwing fruit into the weeds. I like that. It reminds me that the work isn’t about ownership. It’s about witness and care. I ate one—like Pliny the Elder. Overripe in October, but magnificent. True to type and memory.

The older I get, the more I believe that design—real design—isn’t the act of shaping new things, but the willingness to restore what’s already trying to live. To meet chance halfway. To graft what survives to what can still hold.

That’s the work.

That’s the return.

Design is not creation. It’s the restoration of the road to yourself. Your landscape can give that to you.