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The orange tree grew roses

Contributed by: Cecile Vargo on 3/6/2007

For years you couldn't see our nondescript little white box of a cottage for the bougainvillia that covered the porch and the two citrus trees in the yard in front of it.

A Santa Ana wind blew the smaller of the trees down one New Years Eve, a blessing mixed at best, like the strange tangerine/orange fruit it beared. No it wasn't a tangelo - but something quite different, you had to taste them to understand.

The surviving tree was always a delight, with it's thick trunk and outstretched limbs full of healthy green leaves and an over abundance of oranges. It was the kind of tree, like the mulberry of my youth, that a child could climb in and sit and hide, and snack on the fruit while secretely observing the passers by on the street in front of the yard.

Although, by the time we moved here, my tree climbing days were over, and my son was more into books, and videos, and motorcycles, than tree climbing. The first months in the house, on an even more distant New Years eve than the one afore mentioned, the guys got drunk and took plastic whiffle ball bats to take the oranges down so they could try out the housewarming gift they gave each other and make vodka screwdrivers. I'm sure the neighborhood wondered what kind of people had moved into the little white house on Kyle Street.

It was probably two winters into the house that I took the little rubber stamp with our family name on it and promptly declared every orange on that beautiful tree "Vargo", even if I had to take a step ladder to do so. It just seemed appropriate. After all, the one's at the grocery store declared various brands, so mine would too. But I wanted mine to look like they had grown on the tree that way instead of going through an assembly line. One wonders if a passing neighborhood child stealing fruit from the tree, ever noticed the stamp. I know the squirrels that stole from it regularly never did.

The gnarly Vargo brand orange tree started fading over the years, and the leaves thinned allowing the striking structure of the branches that I loved so to reveal it's true personality. I think it was the Santa Ana winds that toppled the other tree that started it's demise. That and old age.... the tree may have been here longer than our our 1939 house for all we knew. And each year the tree got more dilapidated and the production of oranges dwindled.

The demise of the old tree was more than I could bare. Not so much for the fruit but for the memories, and the tree structure that I loved so well. I remember the house paint on our old style aluminum siding was starting to peel from a bad paint job my brother did. Between that and the failing Vargo brand orange, the property was looking bad. The bougainvillea, by the way, was now long gone, also the victim of the fierce Santa Ana winds that blow down the Big Tujunga Canyon and wreak havoc on all that meets their paths nearly every New Years.

There wasn't a lot of money to be had for paint jobs or trees, and no patience to start with a sapling, so creativity took over. Roses were on sale, and I bought three or four different types, and planted around the base of the trunk. As the leaves fell and the old tree refused to replace them, the roses intertwined around the branches, and within a few years I had a beautiful orange tree full of climbing red, pink, and white roses. It was a sight to behold!

A year or so passed, and the guys were working on some stuff at the side of the property. They paused for a break and commented on the rose tree with the citrus trunk and branches. "You really need to get rid of this old thing," one of them said. And I opened my mouth to protest. "We'll take it down for you." another replied. One of the guys laid his hands on the tree to test it, and it began to move with very little effort on his part. The roots were rotten and it was ready to go.

I resigned myself to the death of the orange tree at last. But I made the guys promise to come back another day so I could rescue the roses. I spent one entire winter day from dawn to dusk pruning the roses away from the orange tree. The weekend that followed, the chainsaws came and the guys had as much fun tackling the orange tree with the chainsaws as they had with the whiffle ball bats that first New Years Eve in the house. This time, however, they drank beers, instead of vodka screwdrivers. The neighbor's watched and laughed and cried with us, and provided green trash bins for the dead branches. The bigger pieces were cut into firewood and taken home by my son and one of the other guys for their fireplaces. I had hoped to place a bird bath atop the last remnants of the orange tree trunk, but it was too far gone, the guys said, and they took it too, for the bins and the for firewood.

Another weekend or so went by, and I knew I had to replace the orange tree with something else to support my climbing roses. After two different stops in gardening sections of local hardware stores I found a beautiful castiron lookalike arbor with intricate gates. We bought it, and couldn't wait to get it put together. Once we did, we carried it over to the spot in the yard so naked now that everyone in the neighborhood would pause and wonder what was missing as they drove by. When we got to that spot, we were in luck, the three roses I had planted for the tree, were placed in just right the angles to grow on the arbor!

Over the next few years we repaired the peeling white aluminum house siding and painted it yellow. A sapling orange planted two weeks before a frost hit, replaced the strange orange/tangerine that was lost. Strangely this tree survived inspite of the misread planting guide, now looking like a clone of the original Vargo brand orange. A birdbath practically hidden by sword ferns sits between the tree and the multi-colored climbing rose arbor, welcoming the neighborhood birds, squirrels, and felines, and a topiary of white once a year blooming roses stands nearby. To gaze upon the new cottage beauty is strange and wonderful, yet melancholy all at the same time, with only memories to be had of the strange Vargo brand orange tree that grew roses.

Sadly my pictures are lost in my old out of commission computer and have never been retrieved from it after an office remodel last spring. Hopefully, I've painted a good enough mental picture for you as you stopped and took time to smell the roses from that old orange tree that used to be in my front yard.


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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
Submitted By: Jackie Houchin
posted on 3/21/2007 @ 12:57:05 PM
Rated Story
Your tale of the Vargo Orange and the rose vines reads like a novel...can you place some "Gone With The Wind" type characters in it, a romance, a war and a tragedy that turns to triumph? Seriously, you've written a very picturesque story of your homestead that's ever changing.
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Submitted By: Marion Green
posted on 3/7/2007 @ 2:38:02 PM
Rated Story
What a lovely story! I was hoping there would be pictures but your writing paints a very vivid portrait for your story. Gardening can be such a wonderful part of our lives, like raising children, seeing the growth from seedling to full blown. Well done! Thank you for sharing. Marion Green
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Showing 1-2 of 2 comments
CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Cecile Vargo

Tujunga , CA

Cecile Vargo has posted 69 stories and 21 comments since joining on 8/21/2006. Cecile Vargo 's average story rating is 5.
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