Quillazy

The Avocado Tree

21.11.15

This piece of writing was originally written in 2014 for a university assignment.

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For a time, perhaps around twelve or thirteen years ago according to my fading memory, growing avocados was in fashion among my relatives in Australia. We didn’t buy them from the nurseries though, we grew them from scratch, from the seeds. It was a very simple process too. All you needed to do was to buy a ripe avocado from the supermarket, eat the avocado, wash the seed, then just leave it in a glass cup or jar of water, the seed balanced on one of those plastic thingamajigs used back then for holding up the lid of pizza boxes. We repeated this process with quite a few avocados and their seeds. What would happen next would be, over a few weeks a crack slowly develops in the seed, until the seed is almost split in half only held together at the very core. Then it sprouts, green shoots emerging from that core.

My parents left the glass cups with the avocado seeds in the kitchen, on the windowsill just above the sink. Whenever I visited the homes of my relatives I saw the same thing, glass jars on the kitchen windowsill. I guess that was the best and most convenient place to put them, being close to water, with lots of sunlight coming in through the window. It was a very charming image too, a slice of nature in an otherwise very practical and busy area of the house. I don't believe any of my relatives actually succeeded in growing the seeds to a full-grown avocado tree. It was a fruitless activity I supposed, undertaken more for the purpose of having some pretty decorations inside the house rather than a real desire for growing the tree. But it was different for my family. We did succeed, at least that was what we had thought at the time.

One day, Dad found an avocado seedling growing somewhere in the backyard and moved it, planting it next to the fig tree we already had, the fig tree we had found growing under the deck of the pergola. He had planted his avocado sprouts around the backyard after they had grown to a certain extent and even planted the seeds which hadn't sprouted, in the hope that they would grow naturally by themselves. The avocado tree took its time growing and even when it seemed fully grown, there was no fruit for several years. We thought it might never bear any fruit at all, until last year.

Last year, tiny white flowers blossomed on the tree, announcing its readiness to bear fruit. After the flowers came the fruit, green, oblong shaped and slightly furry. When the fruit was grown to about the size of my thumbnail, Mum picked one from the tree and pinched it open with her nails in order to check what it looked like inside.

“It looks like there are about four seeds inside. Why are there so many? Don’t avocados only have one?” she asked.

“Maybe only one of them will end up growing full-sized,” I answered half-heartedly.

That answer didn’t convince her however, “I don’t think these are avocados. They seem similar to those fruit your grandparents have in their garden. I don’t know what they’re called.”

“How can it not be an avocado tree when what we planted was an avocado seedling?” I asked back. Although I actually hate eating avocados, I had watched the tree grow all these years and was looking forward to it fruit. I wanted to believe that the tree was really an avocado tree but seeds of doubt were planted, then and there.

I searched for images of avocado trees on Google to compare. Avocado blossoms were white, just as the blossoms on our tree were white. The leaves on our tree seemed to be slightly darker in colour with more jagged edges but I didn’t know if that was enough of a difference and it was hard to find close-up and detailed images of the leaves. Or it may have just been that I didn’t make enough of an effort, because I didn’t want to know for certain whether it really was an avocado tree or not. After all, I had expectations which I didn’t want dashed, and time would soon provide the answer anyway.

An avocado tree or not?

And time did provide the answer. When the fruit stopped growing they were still small, too small to be an avocado, about the size of a fifty-cent coin. The most telling of all was that the skin was a yellowy orangey colour. The flesh inside was also yellow but paler and there were about two or three very large seeds which looked like flat peanuts without the outer shell. Mum confirmed that it was the same fruit that my grandparents had in their garden, although she still didn’t know what it was called. Dad went on an online searching spree to find out what it was.

It turned out that what we had thought was an avocado tree for all those years was actually a loquat tree. The seedling had not grown from anything any of us had planted, but through a seed thrown away by a neighbour or dropped by the birds, just like our fig tree. The avocado seeds my parents had taken so much care to grow had rotted in the earth while the abandoned seeds had flourished on their own.

One approach by my family of dealing with the failure of growing the avocado tree was to utilise the loquat tree. We found out that the leaves, fruit and even the seeds served medicinal purposes of soothing digestive and respiratory systems, and healing inflammatory skin conditions. In fact, the loquat was perfect for me and my chronic cold and eczema. Mum promptly picked all the loquats from the tree to make a syrup with it. Dad picked and cut up all the leaves and I dried them with the food dehydrator I had bought through a social commerce site, finally putting it to good use. We ended up with two large Ziploc bags full of the dried leaves, for brewing tea with. All through winter last year, we were drinking loquat leaf tea instead of the green tea and corn tea we used to drink. I didn’t notice any significant improvement to my skin or my cold but Mum was happy as we didn't have to buy tea anymore, and she also didn’t have to prepare all different types of coffee and tea for visiting guests. The guests were in turn quite satisfied with the novelty of drinking loquat leaf tea, which they had never encountered before.

Dad's own approach was to begin growing the avocados again. Neither myself nor mum were interested in growing them again, but he must have really wanted to succeed this time. He went on a craze researching online about the avocado growing process and buying any large ripe avocados he could find. The thingamajigs holding up the lid of pizza boxes weren't available anymore so he stuck three toothpicks into the seeds to balance them on the rim of the glass cups. Over a few weeks he collected about ten seeds, using up nearly all the glass cups we had at home then moving onto the jars. When we were going interstate to visit my brother, he left the cups and jars in a polystyrene box with the lid covered in order to prevent the water from evaporating as he couldn’t be here to refill them.

So it happened that until a couple of weeks ago, the cups with the avocado seeds were back on the kitchen windowsill and it was as if I was transported back in time. At this moment though, the seedlings are all in their rightful place, planted in fertile soil in the backyard. Hopefully this time the exercise will prove fruitful, although nature cannot be coerced by mere humans.

As I wait for the avocado seedlings to grow into trees, I am left wondering about our cherry tree. The tree although many years old already, is still quite small, shorter than me. It was another attempt by dad to grow a tree from fruit bought from the supermarket. The difference here being that I am much more attached to it, as I absolutely love cherries. I think I may be heartbroken if it turns out not to be a cherry tree. I won’t go out of my way to find out though. Time will tell and even if it’s not a cherry tree I’m sure I’ll find some use for it like I did with the loquat tree. After all, nature has its ways.

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An update on the cherry tree: