'Playing God in the Garden' by Caroline Gonda

Somebody has to, you tell me. Because apples don’t breed true.

Cut twice into the living root to make a notch.

We’re watching Look East, drinking tea from the matching gardener’s mugs I bought you and Dad last Christmas. You don’t like drinking from a mug, but you can’t manage a cup and saucer any more.

Slide the tapered end of the scion into the rootstock.

Newton’s apple tree was already dead when the storm hit the Botanic Garden. They’d been preparing grafts for months, knowing it would have to come down sooner or later.

Bind the twig to its new home, and wait.

Biodegradable tape, the young woman tells the reporter. Centuries-old science with a new twist.

The DNA of engrafted root and scion will never match, no matter how tightly they grow together.

When I look at your hands, I see my own thirty years from now. When you look at me, you still see your changeling child.

I don’t know how we hatched that, you said to Dad. I know this because you told me so, on one of our rare outings together, your pride and resentment so intertwined that there was no way to separate them.