Deep in the Reed College canyon lies the orchard, home to various fruit trees. But the orchard is not the only place on campus to forage fruit. Below is a tale from Tracy Poe ’91 about the old fig tree by the Reed College Apartments (RCA) and her endeavors to care for it.
There’s this fig tree, see, down at the RCAs. When I was a kid living at 36th and Knapp in the 70s/80s, before RCAs or even many of the Canyon-adjacent parcels even belonged to Reed, I used to forage from that tree in the summers. Summer-time in Portland was a child-forager’s dream, from the crawdads in Johnson Creek to the old orchards that used to surround the Canyon, yielding plums, cherries, apples, quince, and of course blackberries.
Reed has a lot of legacy trees from the days when the surrounding area was all homesteads and truck farms. 40 years ago they were still harvestable, but it was the beginning of the end of anyone looking after them on any kind of regular basis. Development and neglect encroached on a lot of our old foraging territory over the years. Reed campus still has some thriving black walnut trees, and the remnant of the old orchard just below 39th at the south end of the Canyon. When I was a student, the Grove Dorms were a giant community garden.
Fruit trees are domestic plants, and they need care in order to keep giving food, but sadly a lot of those caregivers are gone and the trees just get old and die if no one attends to them.
Anyway: the ReedFig was still bearing beautiful fruit well into the early 90s. As a Dorm Mom at the RCAs, just a few years after it was acquired by Reed for student housing, I was still harvesting grocery bags full of fruit every September/October.
I graduated in ’91, left for grad school on the East Coast, where I live now, and didn’t think about that tree until many years later, when I attended a Reunion and decided to go give the tree a visit. That must have been 2015 or so …
When I did, I discovered that the tree had at some point been hacked way back. Not pruned, but chain sawed down, so that it was being choked by undergrowth and blackberry runners. I was very sad to see this, and was sure the tree would die.
But I kept visiting, and what do you know, that tree just kept sending out new growth, and searching for the sun. It was too weedy and starved to give much fruit, except in the very upper story where it was only good to feed the birds. Invisible, probably, to anyone who happened by. Every year, I thought, if that tree doesn’t die, I should find someone who cares enough to prune it properly and give it a new life.
In the meantime, I did a little research. The tree has a sister, across 28th Ave behind the farm stand and food trucks. Both of them were planted by the Japanese immigrant family who owned the farm that used to cover the whole curve of the road from Bybee to the Rhododendron Garden, sometime between 1900-1920, from what I’ve been able to gather.
That tree is huge—almost 40 years older than it was when I was harvesting it in my Reed days. And it still produces beautiful fruit in the late summer/early fall. Both sisters are 100, maybe 125 years old now. Standing so near to one another, and yet so different in their fates.
So I put the word out on a Facebook page: Reed Culinaria. And to my surprise, a lot of people remembered the RCA tree and wanted to bring it back to life.
So we got some folks together —alum Hilary Trzynka ’91 agreed to teach a Paideia class about pruning and taking cuttings from the tree. We did that in January. Ten people showed up, but we made cuttings for a bunch of alums around the country who plan to pick them up at Reunions this year. Amanda Waldroupe ’07 helped us get funding to pay for the supplies from the Portland Alumni Chapter.
For now, we are posting on Reed Culinaria and hoping we’ll be able to continue to care for the tree. Our long term goal is to get a group in to clear the understory and prune it back to a place where it can begin to flourish and produce fruit again. We’d love for current students to take an interest and help us re-establish the tree’s health. We’ve been keeping it lowkey, but we’d be really happy to have other caretakers.
It’s been a cool journey to get other people involved, and I’ve been moved by the level of enthusiasm my fellow alumni have shown. I think just for its connection to the historic farms around it and its sister tree, it deserves to be noticed and commemorated by the community in some way.
I haven’t met anyone yet who doesn’t think that is a good idea.
I don’t have Facebook but that story just might make me create an account to join Reed Culinaria…
Feeling inspired,
Taliah Churchill ’25
