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because she hadn't taken it. He didn't feature anyone else messing with his
Semmerling.
She led him out of the foyer. "Come on. We can talk in here."
Jack followed her as far as the threshold, then stopped, staring.
A jungle. A high-ceilinged room, almost a loft, with big skylights, and green
everywhere. Not houseplants. Trees. Little trees, yes, but trees. Some with
their tops wrapped in clear plastic, like oxygen tents, and others with
bandages around their trunks.
"What is this?" he said. "A tree hospital?"
She laughed, and Jack realized this was the first time he'd heard that sound
from her.
"You ought to do that more often," he told her.
"What?"
"Laugh."
Her smile faded. "I might do just that& once the house is gone." Before Jack
could say anything, she turned and waved a gloved hand at the room. "Anyway,
this is my hobby: plant grafting."
"No kidding?" he said, stepping into the room and looking about. "That's a
hobby?"
"It is for me. Or maybe it's therapy of sorts. Whatever it is, it gives me&
pleasure."
For an instant there he'd had the strangest feeling she was going to say
"peace."
"How'd you get into something like this?"
"I don't know, exactly. It started in college. There was this sickly tree
right outside my dorm window. All the other trees around it were doing fine,
but this one was stunted, had fewer leaves, and those it did have were
shriveled and smaller than its neighbors'. I took it upon myself to save it.
It became my mission.. So I watered it, fertilized it, but no good. It just
got worse. So I asked one of the grounds-keepers what he thought, and he said,
'Bad roots. Nothing you can do about bad roots.' They were going to rip it up
and plant a replacement there."
"Don't tell me," Jack said. "You started a save-the-tree movement."
"Yeah, right& 'Woodsman, woodsman, spare that tree.' " She shook her head.
"Believe me, between my pre-med courses and my waitressing job, I barely had
time to sleep, let alone become some sort of tree-hugging activist. No, I
simply read up on grafting, took a couple of cuttings they're called
'scions' from the sick tree, and cleft-grafted them onto a branch of a healthy
one, then I sealed the union with grafting wax. Shortly after that, they cut
down the sick tree and replaced it. But it wasn't really dead, you see. Part
of it was alive and well on its neighbor. By the time I graduated, the grafted
limb was growing like crazy easily the leafiest branch on the tree."
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Her blue-gray eyes beamed at the memory.
"Congratulations," Jack said.
"Thank you. After that, I sort of got the bug. I go to a nursery the plant
kind and pick out the sickliest-looking sapling. I buy it for a song, along
with another healthier looking tree of the same or similar species, bring them
home, and graft the runt onto the healthy one."
"Does that make you the tree world's Florence Nightingale, or its
Frankenstein?"
"Florence, I hope. The graft union is actually stronger than the rest of the
tree, and the scion usually grows faster and lusher than the understock's own
branches. But maybe there's a little Frankenstein in me too. I've got what you
might call a 'lymon' tree over there: I grafted a branch from a sickly lime
tree onto a healthy lemon tree. In a few years it'll yield lemonsand limes."
"Sure," Jack said. "And what are you asking for that nice bridge to
Brooklyn?"
"No, it's true. You can cross-graft the same species, but you can't cross
genera."
"You're losing me."
"Lemons, limes, grapefruit are all in the citrus group one will usually
accept another of the same species. But that lime scion wouldn't have taken if
I'd grafted it to, say, apple or pear understock."
Jack walked around the room, checking out the recovering plants.
"So& you take two trees and make them into one."
"It's a strange sort of math," Alicia said. "As one of my grafting books put
it: One plus one equals one. And the nice thing is, there's no loser. The
understock's roots are getting fed by the scion's leaves."
"I bet you wish you could do that with people." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]