Some years back my father bought at carambola tree, commonly known as starfruit. He liked having it quite a bit. I think the fact that is grew easily in South Florida appealed to him, and he liked the way they taste, too, a kind of citrus flavor with an apple texture.
The tree had grown to a modest size when Hurricane Andrew struck. The tree itself, being tropical, would have weathered the storm without incident. The neighbor’s Australian pine, however, didn’t fare so well, and collapsed right onto the starfruit tree, splitting it in half. In the midst of the devastation it was a tiny thing, insignificant, really, but it was a shame, nonetheless.
A few weeks later my wife and I were visiting an exotic fruit show, and bought him a small carambola to plant, so he could replace the one nearly destroyed by the hurricane. He was thrilled, and planted it a few yards away from the split trunk of the old tree.
For a while things went as you’d expect. You old tree faded, and the seedling took solid root. Then one day something happened, and the sapling suddenly died. Meanwhile, the older tree my father had refused to remove from the yard with the split trunk kept going, scarring over the split, and eventually recovering to an even bigger and more productive state than before the storm.
I am sure there is a moral there somewhere, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. I’m no Aesop.
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I love this …. Inside the fruit pavilion at Fairchild they cut a tree down to the stump and it’s still putting out new shoots. I guess it’s hard to kill a healthy tree; it knows how to heal itself. Is that a lesson from the garden?