Host PK Hattis is joined by the wonderfully talented and incisive local writer Manjula Martin. Martin is author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, as well as Fruit Trees for Every Garden, a book she coauthored alongside her father, the master orchardist and horticulturist Orin Martin, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. She also edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and was managing editor of the National Magazine Award-winning literary journal Zoetrope: All-Story.
Martin, A Santa Cruz native who now resides further up the coast in Sonoma County, recently published a short and timely essay in The New Yorker magazine last month called “The Rebellion of a Fruitless Apple Tree.” Like the rest of us, Martin is settling into her fall routines—observing the leaves as they change colors; enjoying the feel of a soft sweater on a chilly evening. But readers of Martin know that nothing can beat what the natural world can offer, and for this season, that offering came in the form of an apple tree.
Being the nature-inspired author that she is, Martin can observe the burgeoning orchards that adorn the local landscape and harvest much more than what meets the eye. “The Rebellion of the Fruitless Apple Tree” is at once a heartfelt ode to the apple and a raw meditation on family, friendship, our culture’s demand for evidenced achievement as well as humanity’s relationship to the natural world in a time of unrelenting change.
We were so lucky to have Manjula calling in from her home to discuss all of this and much more. But it also seemed appropriate to go to the root of the tree for this show, so we were doubly lucky to be joined by the master pruner himself, Orin Martin, also calling in from his Santa Cruz abode. Orin graciously agreed to impart at least some of the horticulture knowledge he’s spent a lifetime accruing, but we’ll see if we can’t pluck from him a few literal gems while we’re at it.
Show Links:
The Rebellion of a Fruitless Apple Tree: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/onward-and-upward-in-the-garden/the-rebellion-of-a-fruitless-apple-tree
The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-last-fire-season-a-california-memoir-manjula-martin/20010879?ean=9780593317150
