An orchard: a place where you tame trees, or try to

My grandmother’s orchard stopped me in my tracks, and I only have to read the word to feel the shade of those trees

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My grandmother had a small orchard in her garden in Johannesburg. It was a few plum and peach trees, and very shady. The leaves of the plum trees were purpley-green, almost black, and the ground was covered with the pits of decayed peaches, so that when I ran barefoot across the sunny garden with its dry grass, and into the orchard, I was forced to stop; it was like running over hard pebbles. And when I stood still, it was dark and smelled like rotting fruit. There were gnats hovering near the ground. I lifted my foot and looked at the hard folds on the peach pit. My shadow stopped at the orchard’s border, it could not cross.

An orchard is a place where you tame trees, or try to. To plant one is an act of hope, the belief that home will mean abundance, that it is good to put down roots. “These trees came to stay,” is how Richard Wilbur opens his poem Young Orchard.

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—

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battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;

it was the light

Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a memoir for Scribner Australia

Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com