We believe we have found a remnant Indigenous Crabapple Orchard, 2 miles to the west of the Farm along 300th St NW. In 2014 Bonhoeffer Gardens was tasked with finding 10 acres for mitigation (to offset for building the botanical gardens) and approached all 66 owners of parcels on the West Fork of Church Creek (mitigation land had to be in the same watershed). Several non-resident owners were Asian immigrants who owned land valued at more than $100,000 for Green Card purposes; one of them sold PLC 30 acres on 300th St NW, Stanwood. It was planted to State and Federal Ecology dictates (with ~a dozen native
species). At the SE corner of these plantings is a bizarre “forest” of crabapples. We now know that deciduous trees fertilize and chemically treat the areas where they drop their leaves (a good reason not to rake leaves) and this land appears to favor Western Crabapples. We suspect this earthen dirt hosted an Indigenous apple orchard (we have seen others like it on Lopez Island, driving onto Camano, etc.), perhaps for 1,000s of years. 100 years ago, this was of little importance to the pioneer clearing to raise grass for his cattle. But this pioneer period lasted for a brief time and the crabapples would not die! Note the strategic position (behind a hill facing the town of Stanwood and a mile away from the Sound) with a creek for drinking water and another area for septic. We are taking 4 years to build a quantitative history of Cascadia’s Native American populations, and this forest, along with camas and wapato fields, and abundant salmon and shellfish, suggest the Stanwood area once could have supported a large Indigenous population. The population count may have been greater than the 9,000 of today.
https://applesandpeople.org.uk/stories/crabapple/
https://snohomishcd.org/blog/2022/9/28/crabapples-and-camas-alley-cropping-at-northwest-meadowscapes
https://www.confluenceproject.org/library-post/how-native-farmers-shaped-the-northwest-apple-industry-part-1-origins/
A good reason not to rake leaves close to the trunk of a tree from which they fell is that:
It is too much work.
A scary creature might jump off a limb onto you while you rake.
The leaves contain nutrients and species specific medicines.
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