Good News To Report From the Orchard!

Spring has brought some very good news to our Heritage Apricot Orcard. Do you notice anything missing?

It has been almost a year since the City of Los Altos did an extensive telephone survey of residents and discovered there was no support at all for a project that would plow under our beloved Heritage Apricot Orchard and pave it over to build a bigger civic complex.

We even had an election in November that replaced two of the pro-development gang on the council (they were term-limited out, praise be. The third is out at the end of this year.)  Each week, I drove by city hall, hoping that awful sign had been taken down.

"One of the Few Remaining Apricot Orchards of Santa Clara Valley"

Los Altos City Hall, looking across the apricot orchard to the Youth Center and the Police Station.

At late as the 1970s, the Santa Clara Valley was still economically dependent upon agriculture. According to the Santa Clara Valley Historical Society most of the County's orchards of apricot, prune, cherry and almond were small and family owned. Cooperatives helped the region's families sell and distribute their products.

California still produces 95% of America's apricots. Most, however, come from the San Joaquin Valley, inland from Los Altos, Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale--little towns where the lovely climate and proximity to San Francisco and Stanford University transformed orchards into suburbs.

Maybe I Should Not Have Read That Book ...

Part of the apricot orchard the covers the ground between our City Hall and our Police Station. You and I see this and say, wow that's pretty. Someone else sees it and exclaims (as they do in a recent city brochure) "Eighteen Acres of Opportunity!"

It is curious how one book can resonate so differently with the same reader at different times in her life. I first read How the Irish Saved Civilization on a long business trip across the Atlantic, and I found it so witty and diverting I didn't even scowl back at the surly flight attendants.

Cahill's premise, that Irish monks laboring away in scriptoria saved the Great Books of the Greco-Roman world while Europe was awash in manuscript-burning barbarians, may be debatable. But he makes such a delightful case for it, it sounds like it ought to be true.