I know a young couple who created a glorious garden together. In addition to veggies (including an annoying amount of zucchini) and flowers, they’ve planted grafted trees, surrounding them well with doe-defying wire. The grafted apple tree is a marvel to me. Its slender branches wrestle with Gravenstein, honey crisp, cosmic and something else I forgot. Note: I am not an agrarian expert nor is my memory what it used to be, so you may have to lower your standards a bit and agree that close is close enough.

What’s important is that the couple knows exactly which variety will be a pie, which will make an applesauce, which is best to bob for, and which is juicy lusciousness eaten there in the orchard, picked right off the tree. They are ready to pounce as the apple varieties appear, synchronized as a SWAT team. The same can be said for their collection technique of Santa Rosas, Italians and Black Rubies on their plum tree.

Across town and slightly up the mountainside, I have another friend whose hair is whiter and who might be a little wiser. Or not. Age is no guarantee that we’ve learned a darn thing.

Whatever, she certainly knows a bargain. She purchased a grafted pear tree at a deep discount because the store lost the ticket with the list of pears the tree would produce. She delights in her nameless pears, be they Bartlett, Bosc or Comice. I’ve asked her to report to me if she actually finds any partridges amid the pears as she gathers her harvest each autumn.

So far, that reported association between partridge and pear has been debunked by empirical evidence.

I realize some of you may think all this fruit grafting could be too much mucking about with science, just like it was when Vincent Price bonded — literally — with that fly. Maybe the “plant a turnip, get a turnip” school of thought should be good enough for us all. We’re already doing enough to make Mother Nature plenty mad at our wicked ways.

I’m sure some point could be made here about how we can all succeed nurtured by the same root stock as we are. Or maybe just a universal gladness for the life force of trees, like the Maui banyan showing signs of regrowth.

In the meantime, if I’m offered it, I’m accepting a tub of that apple sauce or slice of pear pie. If not offered, I’ll be forced to contemplate theft which is the only real forbidden fruit of gardening.

It will never happen though … the deer would beat me to it.

Linda B. Myers is the author of 10 novels, including “Starting Over Far Away,” available at Port Book and News, Pacific Mist, and Amazon. You can reach her at myerslindab@gmail.com.