Cold Hardy Fruits and Nuts Introduction
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Chelsea Green PublishingCold Hardy Fruits and Nuts Introduction
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Chelsea Green PublishingIntroduction
W e created our botanical garden and arboretum by accident in
1999, after moving to Stone Ridge, a rural community two
hours north of New York City. Because we are both visual artists, we
began surrounding our home with different plants selected as inspira-
tion for our artwork. The natural world became the main focus of our
art as a source of creativity and also as a material through the direct
use of dried plant seeds and leaves in our artworks.
Although our methods of making botanically oriented art are
completely different, our two paths converged as we increasingly
spent more time in the garden and less time on our art. We started to
plant native trees, shrubs, perennials, and edible plants; we ran deer
fencing around 3 acres (1.2 ha) of land on our property. When the
number of new species exponentially increased beyond our ability to
remember the individual Latin names of them all, we created detailed
metal plant tags and attached them to our trees. To keep track of our
collection, we started a comprehensive plant list and began to think
about our garden as separate series of plant collections.
It didn’t take long for us to discover that the selection of both
ornamental and edible plants available for sale in most garden centers
and nurseries was reduced to a handful of tried-and-true species that
were considered hard to kill. At this point we became interested in the
wider range of food plants that would reflect the diversity of edible
plants on Earth, and this has remained one of the fundamental goals of
our garden. Along the way we discovered that many of the beautiful,
decorative flowering plants were also edible. This led us to the joy of
researching obscure specialty mail-order nursery catalogs for differ-
ent edible plants that would thrive in our zone 6 environment, such as
pawpaw, arctic kiwi, medlar, and American persimmon. The exorbi-
tant cost of ordering large amounts of rare mail-order plants led us to
start a garden landscaping company in order to cover what we were
spending on our new obsession. Along the way we also developed an
interest in learning how to use our property as a working ecological
Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts
system for food, and started to inoculate shiitake logs, keep chickens
for eggs, and regularly tap the wonderful native maple trees on our
land for our family’s maple syrup.
In 2009 we purchased the 8 wooded acres (3.2 ha) of land across
the road from our house and crowded gardens, with the intent of cre-
ating even more crowded gardens! Food plants that had been on our
wish list for years, such as blight-resistant American chestnuts,
schisandra vine, Korean stone pine, and Asian pears, could now be
planted since we had space for them. It was a large, arduous project to
clear 3 more acres (1.2 ha) of brush and tree debris, but it provided us
with the opportunity to thoughtfully design and create a series of spe-
cific plant collections. Over time these included nut trees, a beach plum
hedge, and a large Chinese edible plant collection. More important,
we started to collect and plant endangered and threatened species.
We now think of our gardens as a type of edible experimental
station, featuring marginal food species that were not believed to be
hardy to our region, including some of the best surprises: toon (specif-
ically, Toona sinensis), Szechuan peppercorn, Himalayan chocolate
berry, and maypop (a.k.a. American passionfruit), all of which have
produced food for us.
Because of our interests in self-sustainability, plant diversity, and
regenerative gardening, we began sharing our gardens with the public
via open garden days, garden tours, and fruit growing classes, and have
hosted PowerPoint talks at garden clubs and arboretums in our region.
In 2017 the gardens received Level II arboretum accreditation by
the ArbNet Arboretum Accreditation Program established by the
Morton Arboretum. We now consider ourselves a young arboretum /
botanical garden, with the goal of creating a “Living Textbook” of the
diversity of plant life that can be grown in the Northeast. In 2019 our
gardens became a nonprofit organization and were formally renamed
the Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens.
Why Write This Book?
This book is a logical extension of our botanical garden’s mission as an
educational institution, and will allow us to reach people who cannot
attend our classes or visit our gardens. We hope that this publication
on fruiting plants will allow us to share our planting experiences with
a broader group of gardeners.
Readers may notice that we have not included many of the stan-
dard garden favorites (such as apples), nor most of the trees in the
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Introduction
Prunus genus (such as peaches, plums, apricots, and cherries) in this
book. This is for four reasons. First, there are already many excellent
books devoted to trees like apples, and there is no need to repeat all of
the great literature on well-known fruit like peaches. You can also find
more reference material on fruiting and food plants in appendix 1,
located in the back of this book.
Second, and more important, as part of creating a sustainable
environment, landscaping your garden or home environment with a
greater diversity of plant life will not only provide you with more food
but also will provide pollinating insects with a greater diversity of
flower pollen choices over an entire growing season. Nature and gar-
deners alike benefit from more diversity.
Third, we believe that because of climate change, a more diverse
food palette will not only provide gardeners with new and interesting
fruit choices, but also give the human race more adaptability and
planting options as our climate begins to heat up and change in
unexpected ways.
Fourth, based on our hands-on experience with growing fruits
such as peaches, many people find that after planting a peach tree,
they are consistently plagued by a large spectrum of diseases and
insect pests. In our neck of the woods, wild cherry trees are a common
and important part of the forest ecosystem, which means that there
are literally hundreds of insects that like to eat their foliage and doz-
ens of pathogens that use them as host plants. While wild cherry trees
are a crucial food source for wildlife, they mean bad news for people
who garden around them. Any pest that attacks a wild or cultivated
cherry tree near your garden will eventually attack peaches, apricots,
plums, and cherries, which are closely related to that species. While
we do grow a few peach trees, we understand that in order to get
healthy fruit from them, we have to constantly watch and care for
them to keep them healthy. We feel that these types of plants will dis-
courage many gardeners because they become riddled with pests.
Why not try planting a few food plants that are less likely to be a
host for hundreds of pests? This is why we are advocates for planting
all of the other wonderful fruiting edible plants that are basically
pest-resistant. We grow each of the fifty plants represented in this
publication, and the unifying element of all of them is that they are
all about 90 to 95 percent pest-free. Although every plant attracts
some pests, these plants are not as susceptible to the problems that
plague trees like peaches and apples. So by all means plant a peach
tree if you love peaches, but also try to make room in your garden for
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Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts
some of these other wonderful alternative fruiting plants, because
they will provide you with a broad range of food choices that require
little maintenance.
Our hope is that readers will also “see” wonderful discoveries
among these various fruiting plants. We have devoted a lot of the space
in this book to the images of the actual plants. Many of the books on
edible plants have only small images that do not do justice to the
unique beauty of each individual species. Because of our backgrounds
as visual artists, we hoped to highlight the aesthetic aspects of each
plant as well as how it tastes. Hopefully, readers will discover that
many of these fifty plants will fill their gardens with beautiful flowers
that are worth including around their homes.
Most of all, we hope that you will use this book as a source of
inspiration and a helpful guide for creating your own personal edible
environment.
How to Use this Book
This book is the result of our years of firsthand experience growing
fruiting plants, sometimes killing a plant several times to figure out
exactly what it requires to survive in our environment. Although we
focus on lower-maintenance edible plants, we feel that all plants will
need some amount of attention in the first year or two to enable them
to flourish. The “Growth Difficulty Rating” in each chapter is a guide
to understanding both the cultural needs of the plant as well as the
level of maintenance required once the plant becomes established,
with 1 being the easiest and 3 being reserved for plants that have a
few special needs.
We have grown all the fruiting plants in this book at the arboretum,
and we have included a “Taste Profile” for each chapter—because for
us it all comes down to how a fruit or nut tastes when you decide what
to plant in your garden. We hope we’ll inspire readers to try a few of
these edible fruits that are almost never encountered in supermarkets.
