The following is excerpted from chapter 17 of "A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family". Paperback and hardcover editions are available at local bookstores. Copyright 2002 Leila Philip, all rights reserved.
In the Orchard
We are standing in the thick orchard grass, my mother, her dog, Danny, and I. My mother and I are hunting Psylla pyricola, the dreaded psylla fly. Danny is hunting mice. Despite the already hot morning sun, we are clothed in long pants and long-sleeved shirts. My mother wears a bent straw hat, and I were a similar but more ragged version, frayed at the brim where Danny chewed the edge. Entering the orchards in June is to enter an insect kingdom. We need all the protection we can get. Even now the whirring and buzzing, clacking and colliding of wings and mandibles, so many legs and pincers, rises into a sea of sound. I listen for a minute while the insect noises build a shrill crescendo, then just as suddenly subside. A crow's sharp rasp breaks the droning; a ground dove starts her long, gentle moan. Down by my feet, Danny scratches industriously in a patch of yellow vetch at the base of a tree.
My mother needs to know how many psylla flies are in her pears so that she can determine if and when she needs to apply a spray. Psylla is a predacious insect whose nymphs, encased in beds of sticky insect spit, called honeydew, devour pear trees.
"See anything?" my mother asks, pushing back her hat.
"Nothing that's moving," I say, and grab another branch.
"Get 'em, Danny boy," my mother says to the dog.
Encouraged by her voice, he paws the ground harder. Spatters of dirt flick my claves.
"Check a terminal; they like soft new leaves," my mother says, looking across the tree. She reaches over an pulls down a young branch of sucker growth that is shooting straight up. I take the branch from her and position my magnifying lens over the young leaves at the tip, turning them so that the underside of the leaves comes into view. Two weeks ago this tree was a white froth of blossom. Now the leaves are as long as my thumb, and the blossoms that survived the sudden frost in early May have swollen into perfect doll-size Bosc pears. The leaf in my hand has a reddish tinge, so new that it hasn't produced much green chlorophyll yet, the cells still full of carotene. I stare down into the magnifying lens, and my view constricts to a red-green blur. Then the leaf comes into focus. Unlike the apple leaf whose underside is wooly with fine hairs called trichomes, pear leaves are as shiny and smooth as holly. The serrate leaf that rests in my palm is full grown with intricate yellow veins fanning out in all directions from the midrib. I start in the center of the leaf and move outward, scanning the leaf for insects. A tiny dark spot comes into view, and I move ugly, blunt head and lacey, transparent wings.
"Got one here, I think."
Leila Philip is an award-winning author and, when not teaching at Colgate University, can be found scouting the orchards with her mother, Julia Philip. The farm has been continuously owned by their family since 1732 and is now a pick-your-own apple orchard, Philip Orchards, in Claverack, Columbia County. Contact the orchard at (518) 851-6351.
Visit Faces of Farming for more stories of valley farmers. |
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| The New York Times calls Leila Philip's "A Family Place," "an unpretentious, subtly shaded story of the importance of understanding the ghosts and heroes that reside in every ancestral home." |
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