Planting Nine Pawpaw Trees

In September 2015 we had our first pawpaw harvest, from the Wells, which was pollinated either by the KSU-Atwood or the Shenandoah. That year, we harvested four pawpaw fruits and stratified the seeds, keeping them in the fridge over the winter so they would be viable for planting in the spring. There were twenty seeds, and on March 5th, 2016, I planted them all in containers. Most of them germinated. I gave a few away in 2017, for a total of four given away. I also killed one--not maliciously but in a spirit of experimentation. That brings us to July 28, 2018, with nine of them left.

I had been looking at them the past few days thinking they didn't look so healthy, knowing that they probably weren't feeling so healthy either, since they were getting big enough that their small containers and the same soil for the past few years wouldn't be pleasing to them.

So yesterday I decided to plant a few of them, and then once I started planting I just didn't stop. I planted all nine pawpaws of the 2015 harvest (2016 germination year). This brings our pawpaw orchard up to fourteen pawpaw trees, if you can imagine. Though the orchard may shrink if some of them can't hack it Utah's earth, or at least the subsection of Utah's earth that makes up the woodsy margin between our house and our neighbors' house.

The area I planted them is pretty shady, lined with red cedars and covered with ivy. I'm anticipating that if the pawpaws live, they won't grow in the conical-shaped way they do out on our lawn but rather they'll be spindly, like the pawpaws in Virginia that we used to see growing in the woods--spindly because they'll be reaching for sunlight. But don't cry for them. They're an "understory tree" by nature--planting them in the shade is like throwing Brer Rabbit into the brier patch.

I got into the ivy and pulled some of it up to prepare a place for the first couple seedlings.

Clearing the ivy, one of the first things I noticed was a pawpaw seed, one of the many that I have thrown back among the ivy in hopes that pawpaws would sprout spontaneously without further aid from me. But there it lies, thrown there in the fall of 2017 and clearly dried out an unviable. 

It so happened that the pawpaw whose container I had labeled A1 was the biggest at the time of planting yesterday, and I started with the biggest. But what a thing--to have A1 be the biggest of them all. Does it say anything about the way plants are responsive to their names? (I'll get back to you on that question later--I need to consult my crystals for a definitive answer.)

Then I moved on to planting the next one. I was curious, while using scissors to cut open the plastic containers. What would the pawpaw seedlings' infamous taproots look like? What contortions would they make while confined to such small containers? I had a good view of it all while planting the second seedling.

Moving on to planting another one. Mostly I wanted to include this pic because--look!--in the soil to the left of the pawpaw container you can see another dried-out pawpaw seed. Under the ivy, as I dug around, the ground was teeming with seeds that never grew.

(Other than that, excavating in the ivy was something of an archaeology of our son W's childhood. I found a broken arrow, a faded fruit snack wrapper, several dry-rotting sticks he used to play with, some fabric of uncertain origin, and a few other items.)

In went C5--good old C5!

In went C2--who could forget treasured days watering C2!

Since I planted these seeds in clear containers, the soil received a fair bit of light on a regular basis. I've been vaguely aware that some of the columns of soil were looking rather mossy. Now that I was cutting them open, I was curious to get a better look at the moss.

Look at that moss! We don't get that around here very much since the air is so dry. But this pawpaw must've felt right at home in mossy soil, like its ancestors might have experienced in the East. (I'm just kiddn--I don't think the pawpaw liked its soil conditions, wet and soggy and mossy and sunny. I think that's why the seedlings weren't looking so healthy lately. But in the end, I'm just trying to get by with "good enough.")

Another pawpaw seed! (I don't know why I was so excited to find these dead seeds. I put them there--or hurled them there--after all, so I shouldn't have been surprised they were...there.)

Another pawpaw seed.

A mossy taproot. Interesting to think that this taproot was exposed to the sun through the clear plastic.

Now here was a specimen with some fibrous moss!

Specimen C1 won the prize for most extensive moss jungle.

This pic puts the moss in the foreground. And puts the space alien--stop kidding yourself, I know you see the eye and terrifying slit of a nose!--in the background. It would be too much of a distraction, though, to mention the unexpected way in which the planting of these nine pawpaw seedlings ended up being a close encounter of the third kind, so I won't dwell on that here. Rather, I'll save that for my blog dedicated to aliens.

I got them all planted, finally, after sweating it out for a couple hours. Here are the containers of the seeds that din't make it--either never germinated or I killed or died over the winter: D7, D6, D1, C3, D10, A2. (Sadly, it looks like A2 just couldn't take living--or not living--in the shadow of its over-achiever and aptly named sibling A1.)

Here's the plastic-lined box I used to keep the seedlings in, brown with repeated spills during watering.

Here's a map of which pawpaw seedlings I planted, and where. The concentric circles represent the cedars. The cross-hatched area represents some brick hardscaping.

D3, D2, C1

D8, C4

C2, A1

C5

Finally, the last and certainly the least (as in smallest), D5.

Who's the Interloper?

The other day looking online we found someone practically giving away a tall cactus. I don't know my cactuses well enough--is this is a saguaro? So we borrowed a neighbor's truck and drive up to SLC to get it. Turns out the cactus was left in a penthouse by the previous owner and the current owner no longer wanted it. The current owner believed it had been growing in the window for the past fifteen years at least.

This is a pic of S standing next to it, feeling intimidated, as you can see by her face. Usually the porch is the place for pawpaw seedlings, but this big cactus? It's an interloper, isn't it?

But the pawpaws are interlopers too aren't they? That's the whole premise of this blog, Expatriate Pawpaw. Look closely in this pic and the subsequent pic--both of the Mango pawpaw cultivar--and you can see the sun damage on the leaves, caused by the hot western sun radiating through the dry air of the Great Basin. 

And then some other interlopers....This spring some barn swallows started perching on the bricks above our front door. We knew they were perching because we saw them flying around our yard a lot and then we found bird droppings all over the mat in front of our door. It was about this time that we gave the mat a good cleaning and looked up where they were perching. There was a shallow circle of mud--not a nest, it seemed, just a roost, so I wiped the mud away. But by the end of the same day the swallows had built a full-fledged nest up there! We gave in--sure it would mean a summer of bird droppings covering our welcome mat (what a welcome!), but the swallows were determined and besides as we thought about it more it seemed like having swallows raise a family up there would be fun for us, balancing out with the undignified welcome that our front-door guests would need to endure. 

So here we all are: swallows, saguaro, pawpaws, and humans, part of the
rambunctious garden of the post-wild world.

Lazarus Pawpaws

A "Lazarus species" is a species that has long been thought to be extinct, but then it turns out that someone discovers that the species still exists, still lives somewhere. So it has the appearance, though not the reality, of coming back from the dead like Lazarus from the Bible. The linocut print that I've made here, of a raven adding a fossilized trilobite to its trilobite collection, is something I imagine taking place in Millard County, Utah. That's my wildest dream--a raven exhibiting culture by treating fossilized trilobites (animals that dominated the world during the Cambrian era some half a billion years ago) as if they were tokens or trinkets to be collected and even exchanged with other ravens. My wild dream beyond this wildest dream: that the trilobite were to achieve status as a "Lazarus species" by being discovered, alive, scuttling around in some hot spring down in Millard County. (Why Millard County? Because that county is home to the famous fossil trilobite beds of Antelope Springs.)

But this blog post is titled "Lazarus Pawpaws" rather than "Lazarus Species." That's because of what's happened recently with the batch of twenty-four pawpaw seeds I planted on 29 March 2018. As you'll recall from that blog post, I tried scraping the seed coasts against the pavement before planting them, with the aim of helping the little plants come out of their shells (something they had a problem doing when I planted seeds in 2017). But by the beginning of July, scraping the seed coats had seemed to be a phenomenal, colossal failure, since none of them had germinated. I removed the seedlings from the sun and placed them under the carport and stopped watering them. That was that, I thought--they were extinct. 

But this blog post is titled "Lazarus Pawpaws" not "Extinct Pawpaws," so my carefullest readers will already be anticipating what happened next. On or about the date of 13 July, I looked down at the containers and saw that a few pawpaw plants were germinating! Oh Lazarus of plants!

After seeing that there were three seeds that successfully germinated in spite--not because--of my experiment in scraping their seed coat, I returned the 2018 batch of seeds to their place out on the porch and resumed watering them.

Here they are, Lazaruses in the foreground, adjacent to the pawpaw seedlings of 2016. And in the distance, partially obscured by the pot in which the big cactus resides, are the seedlings of 2017. (Still further in the distance, out in the lawn, is the Wells pawpaw cultivar.)

The Fallen

The other day we were out by the pawpaw trees and NJ pointed out a few pawpaws that had fallen prematurely. 

I picked them up and carried them over...

...to the other pawpaws that have fallen early during this summer.

Here they all are, next to the seedlings I planted in 2017.

It's nine pawpaws fallen so far this year, but we've got dozens more on the trees, so we're okay.

Pawpaws at the National Museum of the American Indian

In late April we left Utah for about a week and went to Washington DC for a conference. During the trip, we went to the National Museum of the American Indian, one of the Smithsonians.

It's a great museum, dedicated to history and Indigenous Americans' hundreds of living cultures. A few of the things we saw during our too-brief visit:

A narrative of how Raven stole the sun.

Raven's beak with the sun in its mouth.

A cosmology.

A nice painting of some pueblos in the US Southwest, where we grow our expatriate pawpaws.

And then as we left we did a double take--pawpaw trees hanging over the sidewalk on the museum grounds!

Another pic of the fruit.

Were these trees here just randomly because this was their home range? It turned out they weren't just random but were planted "to honor the natural landscape that existed prior to European contact." Indeed, according the museum's website: "At the museum's entrance, a spectacular wetland is home to fruit-bearing paw-paw trees, lush aquatic plants and native birds, reptiles and amphibians--a serene setting that muffles the sound of the cars and trucks traveling along nearby Independence Avenue."

Here's another relevant URL, with a blog post done in Nov 2014 by, by an intern for the Archives of American Gardens. It turns out the Smithsonian Tree Collection has seventeen pawpaw trees, including these at the Museum of the American Indian.