Wattle

Abner read somewhere that it’s a resonant gesture to clone an old apple tree. You plant the clone near the original tree, and there they are, old and new, same and different, together.

There’s an old apple tree in his new backyard in rural-most Connecticut. Gnarly. Variety unknown. Learning the name of the tree is on Abner’s to-do list, but first comes cloning. This is step one in his campaign of compare-and-contrast gardening. Sassafras and sarsaparilla. Weeping and pussy willow. Have you heard Abner’s going to be a grandpappy? His eldest-by-two-minutes daughter—yup, he and Hazel have twins, they’re almost thirty now—is having a baby. What does this have to do with cloning the old apple tree? Oh, he’s going to regard those two trees with his granddaughter one fine future day. She’ll be a toddler, looking up at him with that face, and she’ll say, “Gabner, these two trees are new and old, different and same.”

Won’t Abner then be all aglow? His very own grand-DNA, articulating how things are the same and different—such a great way to demonstrate understanding. This is the high school English teacher in Abner. Not the retired high school English teacher—the teacher-teacher, the lifelong learner as lifelong educator. Perhaps that’s too pompous, in which case let’s just talk about the wattle fence.

The wattle fence is necessary to protect the apple saplings from deer. These deer are voracious. More power to ’em is Abner’s feeling. He’s voracious too. But you don’t want to put all that love and care into grafting apples, such as finding out how to do it—

“The grafted rootstock must be protected by some kind of fence to avoid severe damage by deer,” say the instructions. Abner is a take-your-chances kind of guy, but these instructions speak to him in the voice of God. 

Let’s make a fence, then: a fence to guard and nurture cloned baby apple trees. But it can’t be an ugly fence like most of the garden fences in the northwest corner of Connecticut. The livestock fences are robust and imposing, but the garden fences, sorry, they are ramshackle, plastic, unnatural. Abner lives on a country road, in a clearing in a forest. The northwest corner is all trees. Trees, creeks, valleys, farmland, meadows, marshes, hillsides, trees. That’s what you should be making your fence out of. Trees.

So Abner searches “How do you make a fence out of trees?” and discovers the wattle fence, a fence literally made out of trees. Here’s how to make one: Place posts an inch or more thick a foot apart and interweave thinner branches between them.

That’s it—so simple even Abner, who has zero carpentry skills, thinks, I can do this. And he does. Boy, is it sweaty work. Also there are moral precepts that Abner does not always meet in the most pristine way, such as: Always know what kind of sapling you’re hacking down before you start hacking. He tries to stick to maple, which is abundant, but sometimes he makes mistakes and winds up felling elm and ash, which he feels bad about, because both of these trees have been subject to blight, and for them to be felled just as they’re growing back—well, Abner, don’t start bawling now. What’s cut down is cut down and becomes part of the wattle fence. 

Cutting branches would have been better than felling entire adolescent trees, but it’s pine trees that have the straight, long branches, and the pines on his land are surrounded by bramble. Furthermore, he would have to get up on a ladder, and he is not doing that. Fall off a ladder, break a rib, feel pain in every breath. 

Further furthermore, Abner read somewhere that new owners of forestland often make the mistake of thinking all trees are sacrosanct. He recalls reading this and thinking, What, all trees aren’t sacrosanct? Apparently not. Trees are also harvested. You’ve heard of paper. You’ve heard of two-by-fours. Right?  So Abner deputizes himself to responsibly harvest trees from his own forest. He sets forth with a foldable, orange-plastic-handled hacksaw and hunts for tall, thin, straight trees identical to other trees growing nearby. These he cuts down with glee.

Abner didn’t know he had it in him. “Woodsman, spare that tree!” he keeps intoning to himself, and then out comes the hacksaw. Talk about voracious, converting years of strong, graceful growth into two minutes of falling sawdust and a few seconds of collapse. “You got that right,” Abner says when the tree gives way. He has not become a famous author the way he always hoped, but he has cut down this tree, and stripping it of branch and leaf is like stripping a sperm whale of blubber. 

He basks in his overexertion during these unnaturally hot days of late spring, soaking his formerly white button-down shirt in sunscreen, insect repellant, chlorophyll, and sweat until it appears to be tie-dyed with calamine lotion. Abner takes water breaks and shade breaks—quick ones, because he’s loving building his wattle fence so much: Interweaving branches. Bending tree trunks to his will. Hah-hah-HAH, he thinks with the intense, imbecilic joy of the borderline dehydrated.

It takes forever. A week. And what a beautiful week. Having something purposeful to do? Are you kidding me? Abner looks at the three finished sides of his fence out there among the goldenrod and milkweed. He thinks, How am I going to get in and out? He’ll build a gate for it. That’s right: Abner, who has no carpentry skills, is going to build a gate.

He goes to the hardware store and gets three two-by-fours cut to size, and the store clerk does not scoff at him. No! Abner lays out his plan to make this gate, and the clerk cuts the boards to Abner’s specifications. 

Now the fence is complete, Abner’s handmade Stonehenge with thick vines swirling upward from the gate like plant antlers. 

Hazel is initially dubious. “When are you going to take it down?” she asks upon her first viewing. 

“The meadow will cover it,” Abner says so as not to escalate the situation, because why argue? Everything comes to an end. But then Abner’s daughter sends him a Father’s Day card saying she imagines the baby as toddler, following him around and “carrying sticks for the waddle [sic] fence.” Hazel inquires as to the spelling, which gets Abner investigating etymology.  

“The first time anyone spoke the word wattle was before the year 1150, but its precise derivation is not known,” he reports, to Hazel’s delight, which is what really matters. 

The apple grafts all fail, alas—but be not dismayed, because the rootstock takes, sprouting fresh green leaves whose first words are Please, please try again.