The middle school students have planted our new garden with a lush array of delicious fruit trees. There is now a tangerine, a satsuma mandarin, two pomegranates, a Fuji apple, a Seckle pear, a giant Fuyu persimmon, a donut peach, a miniature peach, two early apricots including a Pixie Cot, a Violet D’ Bordeaux fig, a weeping Santa Rosa plum and an array of black mulberries, including a beautiful weeping black mulberry tree. Soon there will also be some miniature cherry trees and table grapes.

Our founding students planted a feijoa tree in the heart of the garden. This is a small, beautiful tree from South America. It can be easily trained into a nice shade umbrella (which will be evergreen) and is very hardy. Feijoas tend to be unusual trees, as they prefer cooler sub-tropical regions. They do very well in our mild Bay Area climate. The feijoa, or “pineapple guava” is not actually a guava, but the tasty small green fruit which typically ripens in November is similar to guava. Feijoas are actually in the myrtle family and this tree resembles a wide-leafed olive from a distance.

The story of our Feijoa:

After many months of deliberation as to which tree would be granted the honor of being planted in the heart of our garden, the final week before the ceremony arrived. The middle school students wanted a delicious fruit tree for the garden, which would give a nice dappled shade. The tree would ideally bear fruit when the students are in school (not out for summer break) and should not get too large or it would shade out the whole garden. The final two choices were a persimmon and an apple, both wonderful deciduous trees which would be bare for several months each winter. Voters were divided!

A visit to the Yamagami nursery master gardener, whom I refer to as the “Oracle,” would make the final choice as to whether it would be a persimmon or an apple. I waited in a long line at the small booth at the plant nursery for my turn to consult the “Oracle”. After telling the master gardener what we needed, she paused and declared “Persimmon. No, wait…that will get too large. What you need is a feijoa.” Being less familiar with feijoa trees, I countered her with the many positive attributes of the other trees. She tilted her head slightly and replied in a firm voice “I have already told you what you need to plant.” Oracles do not like to be questioned…

Somewhat stumped with this new suggestion, I returned home to consider how I would locate a large feijoa tree in just a few days. Apples and persimmons are no problem: I already had several picked out. No one had really large, nice looking feijoas in stock, not even Yamagamis. After searching high and low for our tree, I found a nursery that looked like it could be promising: God’s Little Acre in San José. But they were not answering the phones. I would just have to drive there.

At school the next day, Lucy asked me if I had chosen the tree. With complete trust, she presented me with a wonderful gift: pocket change that the original high school research committee collected in 2003, bringing the “power of attraction” to this endeavor, and that she has been saving for nearly 10 years until the proper use of this magic “seed” presented itself. She had been saving this little stack of bills and coins for the perfect occasion and she felt it had arrived. I got into my truck after school and drove down to God’s Little Acre, hoping for a miracle. It took me an hour to get there in the traffic. Then I got lost. When I arrived, the gate was locked. They were closed. I peered through the gate and spied several large beautiful feijoa trees on the other side. Just then, a woman came out. I asked her if there was any possible way I could just take a peek at the trees. She got her husband and he kindly let me in, took the cash I had brought (far less than the regular cost of the tree) and put the nicest feijoa tree in my truck.

Early the next morning I brought the tree to the garden and put it in the middle to see how it looked. As the students arrived for school, I asked them what they thought of it. The students loved it and almost unanimously agreed: “That’s our tree! We want that one.”
And so it was . . .