A blessed Holy Week to all my readers who follow the Western Christian calendar. If you have come to this newsletter more recently, you might like to read my essays from Holy Week last year: on Palm Sunday and The Great Vigil of Easter. They remain two of my favorite entries in this series.
On the western side of our property, we have a hedge of crepemyrtle bushes that somebody planted, much to my aggravation, not on the property line or just next to it, but at about a twenty-degree angle to it. None of the plants showed sign of ever having been pruned, leaving them ten-foot-tall cones of dead branches surrounded by vigorous new shoots. With about thirty large bushes to prune, we are only now, in our third year on the property, close to cleaning up all that mess, removing hundreds of dead shoots and exposing the lovely peeled bark of the mature stems.
Once we began pruning the bushes, we found a wild grapevine that had flourished in the midst of the hedge. Testifying to the neglect this part of the yard had seen, the vine had all but engulfed two of the crepemyrtles. We left it in place to see if it would produce anything edible, but predictably enough the grapes were tiny and, in the dense canopy of the overgrown vine, quickly contracted the fungal disease black rot and dwindled to inedible shriveled pebbles. Accordingly, this spring, I followed the advice of Lon Rombough (an organic grape guru, not, as he sounds like he should be, the guy who played the Wolf Man) for rejuvenating an old vine: I struck it all the way back to the ground, then covered the stump with soil. The roots should survive, sending up new shoots with better potential for healthy fruit.
If the wild vine still fails me, though, I have other plans in place. I am also rooting grape cuttings that I received from the T.V. Munson Memorial Vineyard, which preserves the breeding work of a prolific American grape breeder, the Luther Burbank of grapes, many of whose varieties also resist the black rot that my wild vine succumbed to.
I will be taking one idea from the wild vine, which is that I will train my grapes not to a trellis or an arbor, but onto living trees. I first encountered this technique, briefly described, in Mark Shepard’s book Restoration Agriculture; Shepard makes the point that while trellises only decay, a living tree in fact grows along with the vine. All that is needed, according to Shepard, is careful pruning. On the whole, I view this as an experimental technique with a high likelihood of failure. But, since building and maintaining infrastructure is my least favorite part of gardening, I’m going to give it a shot. Last year, in something of a test, I let a maypop (passion fruit) vine climb a young apple tree, and the results were promising.
Planting grape vines brings a satisfaction subtly different from other plants. Grapes have a cultural and culinary significance like few other plants. Yet at the same time they are profoundly adaptable to local circumstance, with unique wild species suited to virtually every climate. Moreover, grape vines will live, potentially, for hundreds of years and have a growth habit like nothing else in my garden. All told, they bring a new and welcome dimension to the garden.
This Holy Week, of course, I am particularly captivated by the place of grapes in the narratives of Scripture. On Maundy Thursday, in particular, we will celebrate the centrality of grapes and wheat to the worship of the Christian church, the dignity Christ gave them in identifying them with his very body.
I grew up in a tradition that celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly, but with unfermented grape juice rather than wine. Accordingly, we faced a difficulty in referring to the elements: we could not say “this wine,” yet to say “take this grape juice” seemed unfitting, perhaps unbiblical. We tended, with great delicacy and also that careful attentiveness to the text of which biblicist traditions are capable, to adopt Christ’s words from the institution narratives and simply refer to “the fruit of the vine.” If this could sometimes be grammatically awkward, it was certainly accurate.
And I have to admit, I like the term, and I could wish that my current liturgical tradition employed it more. “The fruit of the vine” calls to mind so many other literary and theological resonances: the shoot of Jesse from the book of Isaiah, Christ’s self-designation as “the true vine,” the parables of the laborers and the vineyard. We can even see in the term an intimation that Christ himself will hang like fruit upon a laden branch. And so, “fruit of the vine” let it be.
I don’t know what fruit my literal grape vines will grace me with this year; likely none at all. And so, this Maundy Thursday, I’m grateful for a fruit of which I can be more certain, on a vine that will not fail.