About four years ago a friend visiting from the North rode with me to a rural church outside of Caledonia to photograph the tombstone for a woman’s leg. The woman had the leg removed for medical reasons, and, perhaps thinking it would be useful later, had it buried next to the spot her remains would eventually (and now) inhabit. Her husband’s grave neighbored her on the other side.
I was shooting the tombstone for a feature in Catfish Alley magazine called “Parting Shot.” It was a spring afternoon. The light was good. I brushed the leaves aside, borrowed some flowers from a nearby grave and put the camera on a tripod. While waiting the reddish-orange light of late afternoon, I got some water and washed off the gravestone. It was all rather simple and straightforward. While I worked, my friend wandered about the cemetery reading names on the stones.
Afterward we stopped for dinner at Mi Toro in Caledonia. The place was bright and happy with the chatter of mothers and fathers and kids in baseball uniforms streaked with red clay.
“You know, that was really interesting watching you work,” my friend, a doctor, said as we waited on our food. His comment surprised me. As I said, it couldn’t have been much simpler. He was an esteemed physician who each workday confronted the mysteries of the human organism.
Last week in this space I wrote about the funeral of that friend, who died from pancreatic cancer in March. As I sat in the church listening to his medical partner describe Bob Kanter’s professional demeanor, I regretted not taking the opportunity of shadowing him on his hospital rounds as he had done with me on that excursion to a country graveyard.
No doubt I would have been impressed, and chances are he would have been surprised, as I had been, by my wonderment at work that was second nature to him.
Wednesday afternoon I had an opportunity to watch a surgeon in action up close. Only, we weren’t in an operating theater; we were sitting on plastic fertilizer bags in the woods grafting persimmon trees.
Gerry Jeffcoat retired from surgery at Baptist Memorial Golden Triangle in 2007. Revered by colleagues for his acuity and dexterity in the operating room and beloved by his patients for his skill and uncommon empathy, Gerry brings a surgeon’s precision and discernment to this horticultural procedure.
He says his first exposure to fruit tree grafting came in the 70s from ophthalmologist David Ulmer, another doctor with an intense interest in fruit trees. He’s since learned from Charles Dalke, a retired radiologist, who is a self-styled amateur horticulturist.
Chances are if you have a fruit tree in your back yard, it was grafted. Grafting is one of the few ways man has managed to improve on Mother Nature. By attaching a short section of a limb containing a bud (a scion) of a more desirable plant to a native rootstock of the same genus, we are able grow in Mississippi fruit that otherwise wouldn’t survive here.
The resulting plant has the hardiness and disease resistance of a native and the more delectable fruit of the scion. That Granny Smith apple tree in your backyard (which originated in New South Wales, Australia in the 19th century) was grafted, so was the Kieffer pear. Pecans, peaches and plums are all grafted.
The American persimmon is native to much of the eastern U.S. The tree grows as tall as 50-feet and in the fall produces a small, orange-ish-brown fruit full of seeds. Wildlife love the sweet fruit, which if consumed before its time, is not unlike eating a mouthful of chalk dust. The hard, even-textured wood is used to make the heads for golf club drivers and textile shuttles.
Japanese or Oriental persimmon trees yield large, seedless fruit that tastes something like a cross between a mango and a papaya. That is to say they are amazingly good. We can grow Japanese persimmons here because horticulturists have grafted them to native rootstock.
Gerry and I planned to do the same thing, only our rootstock was already growing in the woods in the form of young trees.
We, or rather Gerry, grafted nine trees that afternoon. I held pieces in place while the doctor sliced and peeled back bark and then wrapped the junction of the rootstock and scion with the flagging tape.
The indicator of success will come in two weeks by which time the scions should leaf out. Gerry says we’ll have persimmons in two years.
As the surgeon sliced and wrapped the new trees, parallels with his forays into the human body were plain to see.
Later, on the drive home, Gerry said, “You know if I had a second lifetime I would have liked to have studied trees.”
All I can say to that is there are many, many people in this community who are grateful for the career choice Gerry Jeffcoat made in this lifetime.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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