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Plants

Eden at the garden center, $19.99 a tree

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Times Staff Writer

The first time I saw bare-root fruit trees stacked up in a Los Angeles nursery, I didn’t realize they could be sold like roses, bare-limbed, dormant, their roots packed in sawdust. Only plastic labels identified them as apricots, plums, cherries and apples, and not just one variety of each but Blenheim apricots and Moorparks, Santa Rosa plums and Elephant Hearts, Bing cherries and Rainiers, Fuji apples and Annas.

The prices seemed incredible: Eden for $19.99 a tree. So I binged.

This is about the successes, and the trouble, that ensued in paradise.

Even as a novice, I knew to leave the cherries behind. Northern California cherry farmer Andy Mariani likens planting cherries in a climate where their dormancy is routinely disrupted by heat waves to routinely waking a child in the middle of the night.

Apricots, I’d observed from a pair of old Moorparks in my central Los Angeles garden, can not only take our heat but, once established, can go with little irrigation. Seemingly unfazed by December heat waves, they produce sprays of white flowers in February, followed in late spring by bright green leaves that diffuse light more gracefully than an Impressionist on absinthe.

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Their green fruit forms in May but seems to take forever to ripen, until late June, early July. Then, for a week, maybe two, as the green hues disappear, taken over by golds and pinks, the fruit becomes perfectly ripe, jam on the bough. Eat it, jam it, or lose it to the squirrels. After the fruit, leaves cool the summer garden, yellowing in late autumn, falling just before Christmas.

There are never too many apricots. I bought two more, Blenheims this time. The label said dwarf. But in its first season alone, one of the Blenheim trees sprang to 6 feet. It turned out the rootstock had taken over below the graft. When I cut back the sucker of all suckers, the actual tree was barely waist high. Perhaps it is the scion and not the rootstock that confers shortness on this tree.

Or perhaps it won’t be dwarf at all. I’m told the wait for fruit will be three years.

I’ll pass the time thinking of the jam.

I had to have Santa Rosa plums. Two for starters. I’d only caught the fragrance of ripening plums on a friend’s tree in July, so knew nothing of their cycle. When the trees didn’t flower in February, I thought them late bloomers.

When March passed without a bud, I wondered if they were pining for the Central Valley.

By April, it was clear that they were dead.

It turns out that bare-root trees, like roses, frequently dry out and die in storage. A nurseryman later told me that the best way to test a bare-root tree when you buy it is to check for suppleness of the limbs.

Apples may even be flowering when you buy them midwinter, bare root. When I saw Anna apples doing this in a Hollywood Home Depot, I took them to be plucky and bought two. I’d heard that, rare among apples, which as a rule prefer life on the Canadian border, this Israeli cultivar was tolerant of Southern California heat.

Because it was already erupting in blossom when I planted it, the surprise wasn’t a profuse spring bloom, but the honeyed scent of just the few blossoms that survived the hardware-store flowering. As elegant and slightly fuzzy mid-green leaves began to form, a few apples developed. No fruit ripens more gracefully, with its green base on the skin giving way to pinks and reds, all diffused by a pale white bloom.

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Dangling on the trees, they looked like something out of a Renaissance drawing. I left them until June, when they were so ripe that they fell. I noticed immediately, and missed them so much that I was tempted to tape them back.

Once sliced, they were crisp, mildly sweet, no competition with the spice of a Washington apple but, like the blossoms before them, uncannily fragrant.

Poetic in spring, the plant was disorienting in the fall. As the apricots and (replacement) plums turned color and shed their leaves, the Annas clung to their foliage, which became somewhat buggy and tough. Buds began to form in November. The tree is now about to flower in the heaviest rains in years, months early, when few pollinators will be on the wing to fertilize the blossoms.

The discombobulation looks like the apple version of cherry insomnia. The trees may be able to take it, they may be just fine, but for me they are as disturbing as a bright green lawn in August, the right plants in the wrong place. When it stops raining, I may remove them, provided my resolve survives the perfume.

If one needs a reason to grow fruit, it’s to have such problems as wrestling with the poetic associations of the apple tree.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Bare-root basics

When buying bare-root trees, check for supple branches -- a sign of good health. Here are some other tricks to finding and planting them:

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Planting instructions: Approach bare-root fruit trees much as you would bare-root roses but without any of the rose culture’s pesticides, particularly ones containing imidacloprid, which will kill the bees needed to pollinate the blossoms. Dig a large hole, 18 inches deep and 2 feet around, and amend the soil with one part chicken manure, three parts soil conditioning compost or leaf mulch, and four parts garden soil. Building up a mound to hold the root, set the plant up so it is supported. Make sure that the roots are covered but the base of the trunk, or “crown,” is not. Also plant a bit high; you don’t want the crown submerged. When the garden dries out, water deeply on a steady trickle for 20 minutes once a week, more often in hot weather, for the first year.

Supplier: Leading nurseries stock bare-root trees; however, an orchard specialist with an exceptional range of almonds, apples, apricots, figs, mulberries, nectarines, peaches, pears, persimmons, plums and pomegranates, from $25 to $45, is San Gabriel Nursery and Florist, 632 S. San Gabriel Blvd., San Gabriel, (626) 286-3782. It sells bare-root trees in biodegradable containers that can be planted straight in the ground.

Organization: California Rare Fruit Growers Assn., www.crfg.org/index.html

Information: UC Davis Fruit and Nut Research and Information Center, homeorchard.ucdavis.edu/

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