Garth Dutton

The Apricot Tree – A Poem

This poem is called “The Apricot Tree”, the title of my book of poems that came out in 2008. It’s about Mary, who was the love of my life at the time but I lost her because I uttered one disastrous sentence…

The Apricot Tree
© Garth Dutton 2005

Mary
used to live on a hobby farm
in the Adelaide Hills.
She was my lover for three-and-a-half years
in the early 1990’s.

Whenever her ex-husband had their 3 children
for the weekend,
she would come down to the city to stay with me.
On other weekends I’d go to the farm to stay with her,
including taking my two children with me,
when I had them for the weekend.
Then we’d take all 5 children out on Saturday night
for a pizza or a Chinese meal
in nearby country towns.
My children really loved
going to the country for those weekends.
It was a good arrangement,
but an apricot tree changed all that…

One Saturday in spring one year,
I called to see her.
She was cooking lunch, and said to me,
“Would you like to have a look at my apricot tree?
Something’s gone wrong with it.
Instead of flowering this year,
it has put out dozens of suckers
all through my flower gardens.
I just don’t understand.
Usually it’s so productive.”
I recalled her shelves full of bottled apricots.
Then she said,
“Your Angolan Portuguese friend in Cape Town
taught you all about trees and the environment.
See if you can figure it out…”

So I went out to see the apricot tree,
and circumstances were just as she had described.
There was not a single small fruit on the tree,
and apricot suckers were all through her flower gardens.
It took me about half-a-minute to find an answer.
The tree had gone over
to an alternative means of reproduction.

But why?
I thought again of the rows of bottled apricots,
and a logical reason suddenly came to me.
I went back inside and said,
“The problem is the tree has no descendants,
so it has gone over
to an alternative means of reproduction.”
She repeated slowly, “The tree has no descendants…”
I said, “Of all of its fruit you’ve eaten, given to friends,
or bottled over the years,
how many of its stones would you ever have planted?”
She shrugged, and said, “None! This tree is so productive,
I don’t need another.
I just wrap the stones up in newspaper
and throw them away with the fortnightly garbage.
I also pick up any windfalls and throw them away as well,
in case they cause disease.”

Then she said angrily, “Here! Stir the soup!
I’m going out to look for myself…”
And muttered as she went,
“The tree has no descendants… Indeed!”
Five minutes later she was back, and looking shaken.
“There is no denying the logic of what you say,” she announced.
Then, “Shall we have lunch?”
So she called her children, and we had lunch.

But as the afternoon wore on,
she became increasingly broken-hearted
at the way she had treated her favourite tree.
“What was it you told me that white people from Angola believe?”
she asked.
She answered the question herself.
“That trees are living creatures.
They have a primitive diffuse awareness
of what goes on around them.
They have never needed to develop senses any further,
as they are not mobile.”
I said, “That’s it!” and she replied,
“Sometimes I think you live in a world that’s so alien
to the one I live in,
perhaps we should discontinue this relationship.”
I disagreed, so we left the matter at that.

But within a few weeks,
she had decided to sell her hobby farm
and move into a township.
She bought a house,
with a quite large piece of land
on which she intended to develop
a country-town Permaculture system.
As far as I know, she is still going well with it.
She now works in a plant nursery.

If I was to look for a turning point in our relationship,
I think I would still pick the incident of the apricot tree,
for I feared that I had put her through
an awful culture shock.
In fact, the same sort of culture shock
I had been through myself in Cape Town.
It is a one way trip…
Once you start seeing and experiencing trees
as living creatures,
there is no way back to seeing them as inanimate.
The world is a scarier place for a start,
but once you get used to it,
everything is just so much more alive
than it ever was before.

I have contacted her once or twice
since we broke up,
but it was clear to me that there was no second chance.
So I wrote a song called, “The Bells of Christmas”,
one of the most popular in my repertoire.
It was about the sense of loss I still felt for her
that first Christmas we were apart.
Writing the song got it out of my system.
Or perhaps it didn’t quite,
for this poem has been difficult to write.

Tags: garth dutton, poem, poet, Poetry

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