[Lapg] Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back to City Trees

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

NPR -THE SALT
Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back to City Trees
by Lonny Shavelson
Weekend Edition Saturday Apr 07, 2012
Fruit Fans in the San Francisco area are surreptitiously grafting 
(fruit) tree limbs onto fruitless trees.

excerpt:
"Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan 
areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don't bear 
fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.
But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly 
grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees."

The entire 3 minute audio segment can be heard here:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerrilla-grafters-bring-forbidden-fruit-back-to-city-trees

Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan 
areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don't bear 
fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly.

But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly 
grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees.

I visited the "crime scene" one recent day, but I can't tell you where 
it is because I was with the "criminals."

"If we say where it is, they could come after me," says Tara Hui, a 
fruit tree grafter. She's talking about city officials, who manage the 
trees and say it's illegal to have fruit trees on sidewalks.

So let's just say we're in some Bay Area city in a working-class 
neighborhood, at a line of pear trees that bear no pears.


Hui and two assistants pull out a knife, reach into a plastic bag filled 
with twigs no bigger than your pinkie, and cut from a fruit bearing pear 
tree. She says it's an Asian pear, and that she's grafting it onto a 
flowering pear tree.

They whittle a wedge into one end of their twig, then cut a groove into 
a similar-sized twig on the city tree. They join the two, like tongue 
and groove carpenters. And when their grafted twig eventually grows into 
a branch.

"There will be a much better looking tree that actually will provide 
fruit for people that come by," Hui says.

Hui's motives to break the law are straightforward.

"We don't have a supermarket and we have very few produce stores 
[here]," she says. "What better to alleviate scarcity of healthy produce 
in an impoverished area than to grow them yourself and to have it 
available for free."

Carla Short, an urban forester for the San Francisco Department of 
Public Works who's in charge of 103,000 public trees, has a different 
view of fruit trees.

"It gets very dangerous very quickly," Short says. "I mean the minute 
that fruit gets crushed on the sidewalk, it is slippery. We certainly 
don't want people to get injured."

She says fruit isn't forbidden everywhere, and the local government does 
encourage them in community gardens.

But that does put the city forester in an awkward position --- 
advocating for publicly available fruit trees, but policing guerrilla 
grafters. Short says her team is looking for the guerrilla grafters but 
hasn't found them yet.

And what will they do if they find them? First, try to reason with the 
grafters, she says.

Meanwhile, Hui imagines these same streets in the coming years.

"Just taking an evening stroll, and then you see a fruit and you reach 
over and now you're nourished," says Hui.

So far, officials have yet to discover which of the city's decorative 
trees will become delicious trees because the grafts aren't yet old 
enough to bear fruit.


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