TheTree - (EPUB全文下载)

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The Tree
John Fowles 1979
The first trees I knew well were
the apples and pears in the garden of my childhood home. This may
sound rural and bucolic, but it was not, for the house was a
semi-detached in a 1920's suburb at the mouth of the Thames, some
forty miles from London. The back garden was tiny, less than a tenth
of an acre, but my father had crammed one end and a side-fence with
grid-iron espaliers and cordons. Even the minute lawn had five
orchard apple trees, kept manageable only by constant debranching and
pruning. It was an anomaly among our neighbours’ more conventional
patches, even a touch absurd, as if it were trying to be a fragment
of the kitchen-garden of some great country house. No one in fact
thought of it as a folly, because of the fruit those trees yielded.
The names of apples and pears are rather like the
names of wines—no sure guide in themselves to quality. Two labels
may read the same; but the two trees that wear them may yield fruit
as different as a middling and a great vineyard from the same slope.
Even the same tree can vary from year to year. As with the vine, the
essential things are soil, situation, annual climate; but after those
chance factors, human care. My father’s trees, already happy in the
alluvial clay of the area, must have been among the most closely
pruned, cosseted and prayed for in the whole of England, and
regularly won him prizes at local shows. They were certainly the
linest-flavoured of their arieties—many increasingly rare, these
supermarket days, because of their commercial disadvantages, such as
tender flesh or the mysterious need to be 'eaten from the tree’—that
I have ever tasted. Memories of them, of their names and flavours,
Charles Ross and Lady Sudeley, Peasgood's Nonsuch and King of the
Pippins, haunt me still. Even the more popular kinds he grew, such as
the Comice, or the Mozart and Beethoven of English pomology, James
Grieve and Cox's Orange, acquired on his cunningly stunted trees a
richness and subtlety I have rarely met since. This may have been
partly because he knew exactly when they should be eaten. A Comice
pear may take many weeks to ripen in store, but it is at its peak for
only a day. Perfection in the Grieve is almost as transient.
These trees had a far greater influence on our lives
than I ever realized when I was young. I took them as my father
presented them to the world, as merely his hobby; as unexceptional,
or inevitable, as his constant financial worries, his disappearing
ev ............

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