Strawberry Tree Fruit: Betcha Can't Even Eat Just One

There is no such thing as a banana tree. (Bananas are the fruit of a tree-sized flowering herbaceous plant.) Pineapples don't grow on trees, either (they, too, spring from herbaceous plants). So you would be right to raise an eyebrow and look all cartoony-skeptical at the mention of a strawberry tree.

Yes, Virginia, there is a strawberry tree, though it does not grow strawberries nor is it always grown as a tree. (Discuss amongst yourselves.) Ours has been growing in our garden for about 15 years. It's about 10 feet high or so, with multiple stems springing from its base. There are so many reasons to like this plant that I feel a powerful urge coming over me to make a bulleted list:

1. It's evergreen. An admirable trait--it's nice to see more than sticks in the yard in winter. Also it provides a buffer year round between my yard and the neighbor's so that we both have a bit of a privacy screen.

What's not to like about a shrub that grows pompoms?

2. Not only is it evergreen, but it also flowers and fruits between October and January. The flowers are pretty inconsequential--little white bell-shaped blossoms, sweet but unremarkable--but the fruits! They're ridiculous--absolutely Seussian in their color and shape: egglike, bumpy berries that are bright yellow at first and ripen into candy-red.

They appear at the same time as the flowers because it takes them a year to grow and ripen--so a winter tree bears the fruit of last year's flowers as well as the start of next year's crop.

3. Sadly, the berries are a bland, mealy mouthful, so though they're edible, they're certainly not palatable (though in some cultures they're used to make wine and jam). Even our Labrador knows that (after having suffered the aftereffects of gobbling up a bucketload of fallen fruit in the past...she hasn't touched one since). But they're stunning when capped with snow, so they're definitely a feast for the eyes.

4. It happily grows in our Pacific Northwest climate. It likes cool, damp weather and withstands dry summers and drought, making it the perfect tree for our area. The strawberry tree is native to Mediterranean regions and parts of western Europe, particularly Ireland, which has a climate much like ours, so no wonder it feels at home here.

5. Another reason it may feel at home is that one of its cousins is a signature native tree here and is also sometimes called the strawberry tree. This branch of the family tree is the Pacific madrone, which also grows round, warty red berries and is best known for its red, peeling bark. The relationship shows up in their scientific names: the "Irish strawberry tree" is Arbutus unedo, the Pacific madrone is Arbutus menzeissii.

6. The latter binomial honors an 18th-century naturalist named Archibald Menzies. The strawberry tree's binomial has a more interesting origin: unedo is believed to derive from a Latin phrase meaning "I eat only one." I like to imagine some ancient toga-clad person eagerly popping a strawberry-tree berry into his or her mouth, only to stop chewing and suddenly look rather alarmed upon discovering that the fruits, unlike Lay's potato chips, will never support the slogan "betcha can't eat just one."

Eleven Eleven Eleven Elevenses

What were you doing at 11:11 today, on the lovely palindromic date 11.11.11?

My mom, my daughter, and I were actually enjoying elevenses at 11:11, at the scrumptious Bainbridge Bakers on Bainbridge Island.

Here's what we very slowly and appreciatively consumed, with absolutely no regrets or thought given to 11.12.11:

Clockwise from top at 11:11:
Cinnamon-sugar-sprinkled muffin/doughnut hybrid; lemon tart;
strawberry-rhubarb turnover.

Afterward, my daughter and I tried to manipulate the temperature/humidity gauge in my mom's apartment to make it read "66.6/66%" (moving it away from the heater, putting it in the fridge, and breathing on it to increase the humidity reading) so that we could officially have the most demonic temperature/humidity gauge on Earth, with limited success. We did achieve 66.4/66 for a few seconds, though.

And while we're at it, here are 11 fun facts about 11, put together totally with a bias toward the things we like, such as horses and food and cumbersome words.

Top 11 List

1. 11 is a prime number.

2. If you divide a number by 11, reversing its digits will yield another multiple of 11. And that's all the math you're going to get out of me.

3. There are currently active or retired U.S. racehorses named Eleven Eleven, Elevenfiftyeight, Elevenlittledevils, Elevenseventynine, Elevenseventyseven, and Eleven Twentythree, but there is no registered racehorse named simply Eleven.

4. "Eleven benevolent elephants" is a wicked tongue twister. Try it.

5. At the start of The Lord of the Rings, hobbit Bilbo Baggins is celebrating his eleventy-first birthday.

6. In Sweden, people partake of a late-morning snack called "elva-kaffe" ("eleven coffee").

7. About 4 million kids celebrated their 11th birthday in the United States in 2011.

8. 11.11 is the birth date of one Alice Huyler Ramsey, first woman to drive a car across the United States; she was born in 1886 and lived until 1983. (Poor woman--she was born in Hackensack, NJ; drives across the states; eventually passes on in a town in California; ends up being buried in Hackensack. Wonder if she's ticked off at being rerouted back east after making all that effort to go cross-country...)

9. On the previous 11.11.11--that of 1911--a swath of the central United States suffered an unprecedented cold snap, an event that became known as The Great Blue Norther. The freaky weather caused some cities to break both their record high and low temperatures on the same date.

10. An 11-year-old girl who won a contest to be Mayor for a Day in a Texas town renamed the local Main Street "Justin Bieber Way" as her first order of business.

11. Fear of the number 13 is known as triskaidekaphobia, a word cobbled out of Greek words by a founding American psychoanalyst of the early 1900s. Humble 11, however, hasn't got such a name (perhaps because it's not feared by many?). If you fear 11, however, feel free to call it "enakaidekaphobia." 

Fine Equine Design

Is your home steeped in an old-world, timeless, monied ambience? Do your furnishings suggest familiarity with the polo field or private boxes at the track? They could, you know. Just such a lifestyle was featured on a page in the September 2011 issue of Seattle magazine, which was devoted to local shopping and new, intriguing venues for a variety of goods.

According to the copy for a set-up shot at The Stables (which really was a stable once upon a time, back when Boeing Field was a racetrack called the Meadows in the early 1900s*), equestrian interiors intrinsically boast a "regal, traditional look," and "horse-themed home goods add an air of sophistication to any abode."

(*Hmm. In the early 1990s, Longacres--a beautiful, old racetrack in nearby Renton--was likewise knocked down by Boeing and the land turned into a customer service training center. I detect a pattern here.)

Here's a link to their photo of "equestrian elegance" in the home. The furniture is heavy on mahogany, brass, and leather, as you might expect, and features "tasteful thoroughbred accents" such as horse prints as well as vintage leather buckets and plaster horse heads. The lord of the manor, of course, is kitted out for a ride aboard Fidalgo, his strapping Dutch Warmblood hunter, who no doubt waits just outside the door, champing at the bit, restrained by a groom.

I thought, in the spirit of things, that I'd share other touches you can add to your dwelling so that it could possibly be as "elegantly equestrian" as our own, where the horse theme is heavily represented.

Old stick-horses Princess (a dehorned unicorn) and
Ginger (who whinnies if you squeeze her ears--wouldn't
you?) make an elegant ensemble just off the cellar stairs.

Original artwork by an artist specializing in equine themes lends a note of
elegance to the central (i.e., only) hallway.

Vintage toy horses from Germany bring old-world elegance to the library
(a.ka. "home office").

The equine theme is carried over into the bathroom, where random,
long-lost horse stickers carried in on shoes occasionally appear, adhered
to the century-old tile floors.

Vintage tack enjoys a second life as casually placed
decor. Here we see an old pony saddle dug out of
an English barn evocatively draped atop a chest
freezer as if carelessly deposited there after a
hard day's riding to hounds.

A battery-operated Butterscotch the Pony lends the ultimate
touch of the ineffeable sophistication that Equus caballus
brings to the interior of a home.

Perhaps someday, when we have a few thousand to spare, we will add this noble
rearing horse to our estate. Here the stallion brings unquestionable sophistication
and elegance to the seafood section of a local grocery store.

Ghosts of Pumpkins Past

Just what constitutes a perfect pumpkin is in the eye of the beholder. Some people go for the really zaftig pumpkins, the supersized wallowing-hippo ones like this nearly-a-ton new recordholder.

Some like the tall, skinny, dark orange varieties, while others go for the classic round, yellow-orange types, the kind that filled Linus's very sincere pumpkin patch.

When our daughter was a toddler, very small round pumpkins with sturdy stems were the gourds of choice. Their appeal was obvious--a little kid could hug them, pick them and carry them around, and generally treat them like a cooperative, spherical version of a guinea pig.

As she got older, her taste morphed to match mine: cheerful, basketball-sized round punkins. We'd go to the pumpkin patch and search until our fingers and toes froze to find just the right one.

      Finally the season came when she urged us to fill the wheelbarrow with pumpkins instead of picking just one perfect specimen. She was happy to help us make a selection, but also wanted to make sure her own choices stood independently from ours.

(I knew that, developmentally, kids have to separate from their parents as part of recognizing their individuality, but nobody had ever suggested that rotund autumnal fruits were going to act out the progression for us.)

Size-wise, the pumpkins hit their zenith when she was about ten, and now that she's in her teens, the pumpkins of choice are either weirdly shaped or microscopic. Carving is beside the point.

So we don't have any super-duper jack o'lanterns on our porch this year--just the kooky cucerbits in the photo above, lolling on top of the television cabinet.

But what our household lacks in effort and imagination this year is amply balanced out by the effort and imagination that went into creating this 14-pumpkin-high tower in our neighborhood.

I am not sure if the pumpkin on the ground fell off the top of what was once a 15-pumpkin tower (I would think it would be even more of a "squash" than it botanically is, if that were the case) or if it's trying to nuzzle in underneath the stack.

Signs of the Times

Good things do indeed come in threes. Here are three signs spotted locally, recently, and double-takingly.

The Shameless Commerce Division working at full capacity right here in my own neighborhood.

If this gate is to remain locked at all times--is it really a gate? Wouldn't that make
it just a fence? How could you ever go through it?

Is this a command to make ducks happy?
Or does somebody just really want some ducks?

Wild and Woolly-banded

Reason number 4,326,897 why I love my husband: When he discovered a fleet of fuzzy caterpillars stoically trudging their way across a soccer pitch made of synthetic turf--an expanse that was as vast as the Serengeti to the poor things--he took time out of his lunch hour to transport each one to a better location in a hedgerow.

One luckless larva appeared to be dead, so he brought it home so that we could identify it. He told me this after we were all tucked in for the night. "It's on top of the piano," he said.

The next morning, it was still there, but when I picked it up, it wiggled. The rumors of its death had been greatly exaggerated. Still, it didn't have a lot of get-up-and-go. Probably because (a) it feigns death in self-defense, which is probably how it ended up in this predicament in the first place; (b) it was sluggish as it was getting ready to overwinter; and (c) first the artificial soccer pitch and now a piano--it had blundered into a very confusing habitat indeed.

Right away I knew the little guy was a "woolly bear"--a caterpillar found across the United States, and a favorite because of its fuzzy, hairlike bristles. We had often picked up and petted these caterpillars when I was a kid on Long Island. (Fortunately, this species' bristles serve more to make them harder for birds to swallow and don't contain venom, though they can irritate the skin of a person with a sensitive epidermis.)

Woolly bears are famous not only because they're cute and colorful, but also because there is a long-held belief in their ability to predict the severity of winter. According to folklore, winter will be extremely harsh if the woolly bear's rust-colored stripe is narrow, mild if the stripe is wide. In actuality, individual woolly bears are variably marked, with the central stripe becoming wider as the caterpillar grows.

The little bear perked up considerably when we put it in a bowl with a lettuce leaf covered with round raindrops. (Woolly bears eat a wide variety of leaves, unlike many larvae, which are dedicated to specific host plants.) First it put its tiny face to a drop of water, and we watched as the droplet slowly vanished as it sipped. Then it investigated the leaf, though it didn't seem inclined to eat.

A quick look in a field guide revealed that someday this caterpillar would grow up to be an Isabella Tiger Moth. First, it would have to spend winter curled up in a bristly ball beneath some leaves. Its body would naturally protect it from the cold by producing a kind of antifreeze. In spring, it would spin a cocoon, pupate, and eventually crawl out as an apricot-colored tiger moth.

What the caterpillar should grow up to look like
(photo by Steve Jurvetson, WikiCommons)

We decided we ought to put it back outside, figuring that it probably needed cold temperatures to develop properly, like seeds that need cold temperatures before they can sprout. According to naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock, we guessed right: In her 1939 work Handbook of Nature Study, she writes of the woolly bear that if you want to watch the larva's development, it's best to keep it in a box outside because "keeping it in a warm room during the winter often proves fatal."

I am exceedingly jealous of the populations of Vermilion, Ohio; Banner Elk, North Carolina; Beattyville, Kentucky; and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, because I have now learned that they have annual woolly-bear festivals. People dress up as woolly bears and even dress up their pets.

Wait a second...I have to go see why my dog and the cats are slinking out of the room...

For Want of a Horse

Posted a tribute to our favorite lesson pony on my kids'-book/horsy blog here.