Spring means cherry, pear and apple blossoms. But in many metropolitan areas, urban foresters ensure those flowering fruit trees don’t bear fruit to keep fallen fruit from being trampled into slippery sidewalk jelly. But a group of fruit fans in the San Francisco Bay Area is secretly grafting fruit-bearing tree limbs onto those fruitless trees. I visited the "crime scene" one recent day, but I can’t tell you where it is because I was with the "criminals." "If we say where it is, they could come after me," says Tara Hui, a fruit tree grafter. She’s talking about city officials, who manage the trees and say it’s illegal to have fruit trees on sidewalks. So let’s just say we’re in some Bay Area city in a working-class neighborhood, at a line of pear trees that bear no pears. Hui and two assistants pull out a knife, reach into a plastic bag filled with twigs no bigger than your pinkie, and cut from a fruit bearing pear tree. She says it’s an Asian pear, and that she’s grafting it onto a flowering pear tree. They whittle a wedge into one end of their twig, then cut a groove into a […]
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