By Alison Colwell

Grafting, in horticulture, is the joining together of two different plants by placing a small portion of one plant onto the stem, root, or branch of another plant in such a way that a permanent join will be formed and both plants will continue to grow and thrive. The part of the alliance that provides the root is called the stock; the part that is added is called the scion.

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Born in Bury St Edmunds, England, I come from a particular kind of English stock: working class, belonging to that group of people with nothing to offer but their labor. One of my great-grandmothers took in laundry after her husband died and left her with eight kids to support. Another great-grandmother kept house for a retired Major after her own husband was killed in WWI.

My grandmother went into service when she was fourteen. She was a nanny, then a cook, until she married and had her own children. A skilled baker, she always kept meringues or fruit cake in her pantry under the stairs, a pantry I pilfered whenever I had the chance. Until her sixties, she scrubbed and polished other peoples’ houses, and she never owned her own home. My strongest memory of my grandfather was the scent of wood shavings that clung to his rough jacket at the end of day and the pipe smoke that encircled his flat workman's cap. They worked hard. They stayed put. My aunt moved one street over when she married. She lived in the same village her whole life.

My mom dropped out of school at fifteen, but she aimed higher. She met and married an engineering student from a nearby college. They moved away and traveled before they settled down in a semi-detached row house in Billericay, just a few towns over from my grandmother. They owned their own house. Mom didn't work. She’d gotten away, and for a while, things were different.

I was nine when Dad left us. The 70s were just over, but still he joined a commune in India. And with him went the possibility of something different.

Mom started cleaning houses. I sat quietly at other families’ pristine kitchen counters and drew in my sketchbook. We watched wrestling in mildewed church halls and stock car racing on the weekend. I played foosball in the pub with my cousins while my mom smoked Benson & Hedges at the bar. Pirated new release movies were screened to packed living rooms. My clothes came from the open-air back-of-the-truck market in the next town. Once or twice a year we'd go to the seaside, pitch our windbreak on a tiny handkerchief of sand, dash into the icy water of the English Channel, or buy donuts from the store on the pier. It was a life filled with making do and community. I never questioned my place in this world.

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In modern horticulture, grafting is used for a variety of purposes, including: to produce dwarf trees, to strengthen plants’ resistance to certain diseases, or to adapt varieties to harsher soil or climatic conditions. Grafting is a skill that requires patience and knowledge. The interaction of stock and scion may negatively affect the performance of the new plant through diminished fruit quality. Some grafts take years to fail.

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When I was thirteen, my mom met Phil. She was riding the ferry with her Slimming Club on their annual day trip to Belgium and Phil was on holiday with his brother. An original cockney, Phil had left London at nineteen to immigrate to Saskatchewan to work as a farmhand before settling on the Canadian west coast.

After six months of letter writing, he asked Mom to marry him. She went to visit him in Canada for two weeks. Then she said yes.

"It's beautiful,” she said. "You can't imagine."

And I couldn't. Nothing existed in my world that could have prepared me for Canada.

I’d grown up in Billericay. It’s only forty-five minutes from London, an old town with pubs every 100 yards, and historic churches with graveyards to play hide and seek in. There was an old museum on the main street, filled with Victorian bric-a-brac, and sometimes mom would pay the penny admission and we'd wander inside, peering into glass cabinets. There was a two-headed lamb on the second floor that fascinated and repulsed me. I couldn’t help but look, then turn quickly away. Streets are narrow, houses are small, and towns run into each other, with little green space between them.

To reach my senior school, I had to cross through an underpass; the electric lights were spaced too far apart, leaving deep pockets of shadow, and the walls were garish with graffiti. The older kids used it to smoke and drink. Even at eight in the morning it smelled of vomit and piss. Two thousand kids attended the school. It had its own farm and its own swimming pool, albeit unheated, with much-repeated stories about the dead foxes found floating by the cleaning staff. We walked on the left side of the corridors. Stood up when a teacher entered the room. Life followed set rules.

To prepare me for Canada, mom bought me the book There's a Raccoon in my Parka. But I didn’t know what a raccoon was. Or a parka. She said we’d be able to see the ocean from Phil's kitchen table, and that the couple at the end of the street fed raccoons outside their living room window. I watched old Clint Eastwood westerns for their glimpses of North America.

Our tickets were for September 21st, 1983. I was allowed one suitcase to pack up the first thirteen years of my life. Which books to bring? Which clothes? Which toys would signify my childhood? My perfect pink bedroom, with the glass-topped vanity and ruffled pink skirt; almost everything that defined who I was had to be left behind. I brought my diaries. I left my dolls. I brought my books of folktales, but left behind my Agatha Christies.

Canada was a shock. I thought there would be more horses. I thought there would be fewer trees. Everything was much bigger than I expected: department stores were bigger, cars were bigger, even birds and flowers seemed bigger.

One day I was exploring on my stepfather’s property and found a ravine filled with huge, startling yellow flowers. I dragged everyone down to see, awestruck by their unexpected beauty. Phil laughed at me. I had discovered skunk cabbage.

The space I now inhabited was impossibly huge, unconstrained by family history. The lack of belonging was bewildering.

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In theory, any two plants that are closely related botanically and that have a continuous cambium can be grafted. In practice, it’s trickier. Grafts between plants of the same species are usually successful, between genus only occasionally so, and grafts between families are nearly always failures. Closeness of botanical relationship is not a promise of success, and it’s best to seek advice from other gardeners. The success of the graft is mediated by many complex physiological and environmental factors.

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In England, I’d always worn a school uniform: white blouse, purple tie, grey skirt, grey cardigan, grey socks, brown leather shoes. It was boring and predictable and completely safe. In my first year of high school in Canada, I could choose what to wear to class for the first time. I wore streaks of pink blush and electric blue eyeshadow and sweaters knitted by my grandmother and grey rugby pants with dressy white blouses. My grade nine school photos are cringe-worthy.

At first, I was the pet of the popular girls. They helped me open my locker with its unfamiliar combination lock. They sat with me at lunch and recess, but after six weeks, they told me to go find some new friends; I’d lost my cool value. High school was hard. Everything about me was wrong: my clothes, my accent, and the way I thought. Years passed. By grade twelve, I was spending my time with the other nerds in the library. Competition was fierce to see who would be chosen valedictorian. I’d found my place to blend in.

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The success or failure of any grafting operation is based upon the compatibility of each plant, by the closeness of the fit, and cambial contact. The union is initially held in place by pressure exerted on the stock, by grafting tape, or moss and plastic, applied over the point of the graft.

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At thirteen, I babysat; at fourteen, I plucked chickens in a poultry processing facility. I cleaned stalls at a thoroughbred breeding stable, I was a chambermaid at a resort, a cashier in a coffee shop, I cleaned houses, of course, managed a bookstore, read tarot cards, waitressed. I did bookkeeping for a non-profit, desktop publishing for a bookstore. I opened my own bakery, getting up at four in the morning to make cinnamon buns and scones. I worked throughout school, throughout college, university, and three marriages. I have always worked; that core piece of myself, my rootstock, has always rung true.

Almost forty years after I immigrated to Canada, I live on a small island, where I manage a local non-profit. The mission statement of the organization is to build community. It turns out I’m good at that. I coordinate community potlucks, run the local food bank, and organize the seniors’ meals program.

Two years ago, a massive windstorm knocked out power to the island the day before our Winter Solstice Potluck. The decision whether to cancel was mine. I chose to carry on. The next day, even though some of the roads were still blocked with downed trees, volunteers hiked to the community hall to help. We cooked turkeys in the propane ovens, ran generators to pump water.

Over a hundred people came that night, gathering in the light of dozens of lanterns and candles, sharing food and stories of the storm. Musicians took to the stage, played acoustic sets. We sang carols and pop songs while washing dishes with water heated on the stoves. To hear anyone talk about it now, that Solstice, the one with no power, blocked roads, no phone lines, that one was the most magical.

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When grafting is successful, then something entirely new, perhaps even something unanticipated has been created. Looking back four decades, it’s hard to trace the path that brought me here. I couldn’t have foreseen how the graft of Canada onto the sturdy English stock would lead to this community where I’ve set down my own roots, raised my own children, to this place where I have blossomed and thrived.

Alison Colwell is a single working mother of two children with mental health challenges and a survivor of domestic abuse, all of which inform her creative writing. Her CNF work can be found in the climate-fiction anthology Rising Tides, the NonBinary Review and The Fieldstone Review and The Humber Literary Review.