Apple and pear trees are common sights along the South Shore of Nova Scotia, but a new nursery just outside Lunenburg is bringing a vast array of new species of fruit trees to the area. Originally from Germany, Annette Clarke moved to British Columbia in the early 2000’s to study the ecosystems within the old growth forests of the West Coast. Her love of trees is a life-long one, and it eventually led her to open a nursery in that province. But when climate change brought the threat of intensified forest fires and longer-than-usual droughts, Annette began to look for a new home that would be suitable for herself, her son, and the 65 varieties of exotic fruit trees she has nurtured and experimented with, including guavas, figs and persimmons. Countless Journeys host Tina Pittaway visits the Exotic Fruit Nursery to hear more about Annette’s obsession with fruit trees, and what she has planned for her new life in Lunenburg County.
[00:00:00] Annette Clarke: Hi buddy. How's it going?
[00:00:08] Tina Pittaway: This is Annette Clark and we are in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. We're also in a bit of a construction zone.
[00:00:15] Annette Clarke: Yeah. Let him hang a little bit if you can. Yeah, I mean they're in the way.
[00:00:18] Tina Pittaway: This past February I stopped by her nursery, the aptly named Exotic Fruit Nursery, where she was overseeing the completion of a huge greenhouse.
[00:00:28] A greenhouse that's home to more than 65 different varieties of exotic fruit trees and bushes. Exotic fruit isn't something we see a lot of here on the south shore of Nova Scotia, where Apples, plums and peaches are the mainstay of the fruit growing industry. But Annette Clark wants to offer something a little different.
[00:00:45] Annette Clarke: Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I love doing this. Well, one thing is I really like eating fruit and, and I love fruit. What I'm trying to do is provide plans that are hardy and easy to grow, and that also can take a range of temperatures.
[00:00:58] Tina Pittaway: There are several varieties of guava...
[00:01:01] Annette Clarke: Chilean guava, and these are Queen Victoria's favorite fruit. Uh, they have this amazing aftertaste. It's, it's, uh, like winter green.
[00:01:12] Tina Pittaway: And the pineapple guava has tasty flowers that Annette finds hard to resist.
[00:01:17] Annette Clarke: And I love that one. It's um, the fruit is delicious too, but the flowers, the flowers have those puffy white leaf leaves and they taste like marshmallow or they melt on your tongue.
[00:01:31] Tina Pittaway: I'm Tina Pittway, and this is Countless Journeys from the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. Annette Clarke's story is next.
[00:01:39] TAKE MONTAGE
[00:01:47] Countless Journeys.
[00:01:49] All of our chefs represent either our grandmothers or our mothers or our aunts or the land we come from, or the place we grew up in, and we put ourselves on the plate.
[00:02:01] It was my home, it was everything. People came in and wanted to talk to me, and whenever they came in to buy a loaf of bread, they had to make sure that I knew that they bought a loaf of bread and sat down and wanted to talk to me.
[00:02:16] It was Portuguese women coming here to build a better life, but also to help build Canada.
[00:02:21] It's, it's scary to make that change. Our, our change was absolute. There was no going back. So it was a, a brave thing for my parents to do.
[00:02:31] Instead of feeling torn between my two realities, I decided to feel happy wherever I am.
[00:02:40] FADE MUSIC
[00:02:45] Annette Clarke can't remember a time when trees weren't a part of her life.
[00:02:56] Annette Clarke: I just love nature and, and trees particularly, and I always hung in a tree. What I do remember is as a kid, because I didn't have siblings and I was by myself a lot, so I always hung in a tree. I remember when I was coming home from school and, uh, I climbed my, my birch tree was a big old birch tree and I was hanging there for hours in the tree and sitting in trees and I just loved climbing and, and, and so I don't know. I always had a relationship with trees for some reason, and love nature in general.
[00:03:22] Tina Pittaway: And it was her love of trees that brought her to Canada in 2001.
[00:03:26] Annette Clarke: I'm originally from Germany and moved to the Wests coast of Canada about 20 years ago and lived there yeah, for about 20 years.
[00:03:34] And then 2021 in May, we moved to Lunenburg. I studied biology, geography, forestry and soil science and I picked my research area on the west coast cuz I love big trees and so I really wanted to work with forest ecology and yeah, just choose my research area there because of, of the old growth forest that was still there in Vancouver.
[00:03:57] Tina Pittaway: Annette's graduate work involved restoring wetlands in British Columbia. She met her husband soon after arriving.
[00:04:04] Annette Clarke: Yeah, well when I came over I had no land there or anything. I just did my research. I met my late husband and, um, my son was born, so I was working in research still and did service, um, in the forest.
[00:04:17] Um, but my husband then got ill and died actually pretty, pretty soon. And so when my son was one year old, um, then I decided I didn't wanna live in the big city cuz it wasn't planned really to live there anyway, so we found a place on the Sunshine Coast close by, moved there cuz we found a really cheap piece of land, build a house on a half acre.
[00:04:39] Tina Pittaway: And it was on that little half acre piece of land that Annette first started to grow fruit for both the joy of it as well as necessity.
[00:04:47] Annette Clarke: Of course it was food security for us too, because we didn't have much money at the time. But we did plant a few fruit trees, just regular apples, pears, whatever we can get our hands on, on our half acre as well we had a garden. We were in a fruit tree program where there were abandoned fruit trees or people who can or didn't wanna pick fruit. So people would come and then the harvest gets shared. So we were part of this. So I remember climbing every tree in the neighborhood, picking fruit. It's like treasure hunting really.
[00:05:13] I said, oh my God, look what we can get here by. It's just finding treasures more than, than feeling poor.
[00:05:19] Tina Pittaway: That little house was home to Annette and her son for a few years, and eventually she was able to buy a larger property with bigger gardens and some livestock. And with more land to work with, Annette's love for fruit trees really started to take root.
[00:05:34] Annette Clarke: It was three acres of blackberries, so we hand clipped them all and build a house again and planted 250 fruit trees. And you have to have a passion for it, for sure, because it's not like, it's not for making quick money so it's, it's just really something you love doing. So that's why you're doing it.
[00:05:51] But it was a steep learning curve for sure. It was a lot to do, and from fencing to planting to knowing how to keep them alive to harvesting. And I think we had eight ponds and about eight huge water storage tanks because there were some droughts in the summer on the coast.
[00:06:07] Tina Pittaway: It was those droughts on the west coast that prompted Annette and her son to start looking seriously at moving their lives and their business elsewhere.
[00:06:15] Annette Clarke: Traditionally, I mean, I mean, it's a rainforest on the west coast, but traditionally there has always been a, a slight summer drought and between July, August, but it's a short, it used to be a short period of time, so it was never a real big issue. I mean, there, there is a history of forest fires on the, on the west coast too, but it was never a big deal like where we were living there because it's close to the ocean and it's usually moist enough. But it started changing. I remember in 2015 was the first year we really noticed and had a real problem because, uh, the water. Supply. Um, it was tricky because it was just coming from one lake and the local - we were kind of discovered by Vancouver, which was close by, but still kept at bay because there was a ferry in between where we lived and so, Once it got discovered and there was a lot of more development brought in it just the water got scarce and then of course the droughts got longer and there was a real problem.
[00:07:12] I remember 2015 we were actually threatened by having no water, but it got worse after that. It got, of course, we hit the drought. It's got worse and more people moved in and there was nothing be done really about it. So we had water storage tanks, we had duck ponds. I invested us whatever I could, right in, in water storage myself, but it was never enough. If you run a farm, you need a lot of water.
[00:07:33] Tina Pittaway: Pouring so much time and money into a tree based business and living under the threat of drought and forest fires. It was not something Annette wanted to live with long-term. Around 2019 with their son in his late teens and taking a bigger interest in the business, they began to look seriously at moving away from the west coast.
[00:07:52] Annette Clarke: And first we thought we 'd move back to Europe cuz my my parents are getting older and, and we thought maybe move closer. We were actually going already to North and Spain to see if we could move there cuz beautiful climate there. I love it there. But it was just too much of a drastic jump culture. Again, learning another language again.
[00:08:09] And as much as I like new challenges, it felt this time too much. So we decided to stay in Canada.
[00:08:14] Tina Pittaway: Heading to the east coast made a lot of sense. It brought them much closer to Europe making travel to see her folks in Germany a little easier. And the proximity to the ocean was a big selling point too.
[00:08:25] Annette Clarke: It was actually people we knew from the west coast that, um, moved five years before us to Lunberg and they had sent some pictures and so we started looking into this. I thought, oh, it's just lovely. Right. Looking at the, I love the landscape and it reminds me a bit of, of home, like of Germany, cuz of, there's a, there's a lot of German background here too.
[00:08:45] Yeah, so it just felt right to to move here.
[00:08:51] Tina Pittaway: The nursery is set on 33 acres that is a patchwork of hayfields, forest and farmland. The greenhouse is 24 by 12 meters. Annette takes me inside where there's a small entry room that is sectioned off from the main part of the greenhouse.
[00:09:08] She plans to use this space to host tastings once the trees start to bear fruit. And in this space there are a few trees and grapevine planted directly into the ground.
[00:09:19] Beautiful.
[00:09:19] Annette Clarke: Yeah, we're slowly getting there. Well, we're standing in, that's a little addition of the greenhouse, as part of the greenhouse.
[00:09:26] And so what we can see here is that we are planting in the ground instead of just in pots, so people can see how the tree or the plant looks at maturity and also, Taste and sample the fruit or the whatever the plants produce. And here we have some weeping mulberries, some grapes in the ground that will make a beautiful arbour over the sitting area here.
[00:09:49] And then some hardy kiwis, I have them also planted outside. I have three acres fenced off and along the fence we're going to plant climbers from grapes to kiwi to akebia chocolate vines. This will be all covered hopefully soon in climbers, the whole fenced area.
[00:10:06] Um, so what I'm trying to do is more something value added and also some educational, because I have the educational background and I would like to provide more workshops and classes and tours here. So people, because lots of the things we grow, people have either never seen or never tasted at least. And so it would be nice to introduce people to it. So we start with sitting at a table in, in this little part of the greenhouse, and I would like to do tasting events, for example, or just even provide people with opportunity to sample. And then once the orchard is grown up, because we have a orchard outside and we grow in the greenhouse as well, and once it's, once the trees are mature, we will have enough production to also sell. But right now it's very limited still. So we, we'll probably do more tasting events and actually selling masses of fruit.
[00:10:54] Tina Pittaway: Inside the greenhouse is home to more than 65 varieties of fruit bearing bushes and trees that Annette brought from BC.
[00:11:01] Annette Clarke: What I'm trying to do is provide plants that are hardy and easy to grow, and that also can take a range of temperatures. So most things that I have, for example, I have a hardy flying, dragon citrus, um, and it can take down to minus 20 Celsius, but still produce lemons.
[00:11:18] Tina Pittaway: Some are in huge containers. Others planted directly into the earth. Many of them haven't necessarily been grown here before, but are varieties that Annette has identified that should be able to survive in the various microclimates here in Nova Scotia. My visit to the nursery was just a few days after a record setting cold snap in February with temperatures in many parts of the province getting below minus 40 degrees with the windchill. Keeping the greenhouse from getting too cold was a challenge.
[00:11:47] So in the greenhouse too, really tough it, it costs so much and it's so difficult to heat it and keep it in a specific temperature. So when we had this really extreme cold spell, um, we had minus five in the greenhouse and minus 22 outside, plus wind chill was probably minus 35 outside, with the wind chill.
[00:12:05] So I was really happy that we, cuz I was a bit worried that it kept fairly warm inside here. So I'm staying away from the real finicky tropical ones or the ones that, that are really difficult to grow or have a lot of diseases. So I wanna really provide things that are easy for people, especially if they're start new and they didn't even know the plant.
[00:12:22] And if it's then very difficult to grow or just dies and it's no fun experience. So I, I'm trying to really focus on just the range of hardy plants.
[00:12:31] And, and then in the larger part of the greenhouse we're starting to, so right now it's still in the state of bit of chaos. And there's a couple crators here that I started digging, hitting rocks where, where the trees that are in pots still have to go in the ground. So this area is now planted with trees. What I will also do, I will plant an understory. So when the trees grow up, there are lots of herbs and bushes that will grow around them. And I will also intermix, for example, I have a lot of "volunteers" too. I, I always throw my compost in here and then quite often you have, we had melon seeds last year and we had all those honey dew melons growing out of it, and they actually produce really beautiful melons. So I will let all this be too. So it will be half ground cover.
[00:13:16] It's a bit overwhelming trying to take it all in. Even though many of the trees and bushes are wrapped in burlap, there's still a lot of growth around us. The height of the greenhouse is 17 feet, and though nothing at this point reaches that, the soaring height of it combined with the warmth, it's a bit of a rush to the senses.
[00:13:35] Annette Clarke: And these are pink lemonade blueberries here. They're already budding out in February. Okay. Because in the greenhouse, they're a little bit advanced. There are peaches and nectarines. Some of them we grew from, from seed. There are nut trees, heart nuts, and walnuts and mulberry trees. And then we have those trellis here that we build up for the climbers.
[00:13:57] There's more grapes in here that, cuz we have the height in the greenhouse, it's 17 feet high in the middle. So we will make sure that we use all the space and not space, any space. So it will all grow up to the 10 feet height there. And then keep going over the um, metal pieces. And so yeah, here's the all imports and we started here already putting things on the ground.
[00:14:20] These are, I just wrapped everything cuz we had this one extreme cold spell. Um, so I've wrapped everything in in fabric and I have some, um, these are fig trees here that we put in the ground.
[00:14:33] Tina Pittaway: Pointing out the fig trees, Annette is reminded of her first encounter with fresh figs when she was vacationing with her family in Italy when she was a little girl.
[00:14:42] Annette Clarke: I just remember this massive tree and I, as I said, I love climbing trees, so of course - I think I had not a friend, but someone I met another kid - and so we climbed up this tree and remember it was loaded with ripe, over ripe figs, and it was just, Like heaven, like sitting in that tree and just stuffing yourself with ripe figs.
[00:15:01] Tina Pittaway: And what did the figs taste like?
[00:15:03] Annette Clarke: Well, amazing. Like figs ripe, figs taste, like mix of honey with, I don't know, refreshing, juicy, not too sweet. But yeah, I just love figs because that's why we grow so many figs ourselves too.
[00:15:16] Tina Pittaway: Do you have a favorite?
[00:15:18] Annette Clarke: Persimmon.
[00:15:19] Tina Pittaway: Persimmon?
[00:15:20] Annette Clarke: Yeah, I think it's, if I would choose one, it would be the persimmon, I think.
[00:15:24] Yeah, I mean I love them all and it's nice to have the variety, but yeah.
[00:15:29] Tina Pittaway: And persimmon is normally, where is its natural habitat?
[00:15:32] Annette Clarke: Um, there are some native North American persimmons too, that are smaller and they grow actually here in, well, not here, Nova Scotia. Uh, but they would grow from, well, they reach into Southern Ontario and then down United States, but they're grown, uh, in China and Japan too.
[00:15:52] And there they're grown like apples here, so they're everywhere. And there's hundreds and hundreds of different varieties.
[00:15:58] Tina Pittaway: And what do the, what does persimmon taste like?
[00:16:01] Annette Clarke: It's always tough to describe a fruit when you... a ripe persimmon. It's like a juice bag, like a jello, juice bag. Very, very sweet.
[00:16:09] Very, very refreshing. Um, yeah, I could just describe it as a, as a really sweet jello maybe, but with a really nice fruity aftertaste so it's not just sweet, you have to let it ripen because you can sometimes find persimmons in the stores, but they're all picked unripened, and they're really hard, and you can let it sit on the counter until they get a bit softer.
[00:16:31] But you never achieve that quality and that taste as if you let them ripen on the tree. And it's just amazing like having those overripe dripping juice bags.
[00:16:42] Tina Pittaway: The tour continues over to a few large cherry trees. Ones that also made the journey from BC.
[00:16:49] Annette Clarke: These are Cherry trees, and I was just scary, scared to put them outside because of something we didn't have on the west coast, which is the black knot, and that affects the cherry trees and plum trees mostly.
[00:17:02] And so, it's a fungus. It, it, um, you've probably seen it, it's those big black masses then hang on the right and it slowly kills the trees over the years. Um, so I was hesitant to put them out of the greenhouse cuz I felt bad for them. But because they get over 40, 50 feet tall. So I have to at one point, kick some of them out, unfortunately.
[00:17:22] But I have a couple of miniature, uh, dwarf cherry trees that are all going into the greenhouse here. And then here there's some bushes underneath and some are evergreen. They're all covered. See? Okay. Yeah. Um, these are Chilean Guavas. Oh, okay. And these are Queen Victoria's favorite fruit. Uh, they have this amazing aftertaste.
[00:17:44] It's, it's, it's, like wintergreen taste and we freeze them often. I mean, we don't have any production yet. I just planted the bushes. But In BC we had them in bags full of in the freezer. They produce, they keep producing until frost. And we had a distillery that made a special drink out of it and had their own secret recipe and they always bought all our crop frozen.
[00:18:10] So that's another thing. We don't just only have it fresh, but we also have three big freezers. So we throw it all in the freezer and then can sell it in the winter or use it in the winter. This is a pineapple guava here,, it's called a pineapple guava. Oh, and I love that one. It's um, the fruit is delicious too, but the flowers beautiful.
[00:18:28] The flowers have those puffy white leaf leafs, and they taste like marshmallow. They melt on your tongue. They're really sweet. And when you put them in your mouth and they melt really in your mouth, so, so I love the flowers. Even we, we often don't have fruit because we ate all the flowers. Beautiful. The flower petals, beautiful outside, dozens of fruit trees are in the ground and seemingly surviving all that mother nature has thrown at her these past few weeks.
[00:18:56] Yeah, we started putting an orchard in, so we had a lot of apple trees and pear trees and we put those all already in the ground. Then we have some berries, uh, red, but lots of different ones. They are more the unusual ones. And we have nut trees already planted on the other side. And I unfortunately have to put some cherry trees out because I can't keep them all in the green now.
[00:19:19] So I hope they're doing well here. Yeah.
[00:19:21] Um, and then, yeah, we have this beautiful piece of land. I, I love it. It's, we have our own little drumhill and ponds. There's one pond there, and then beautiful piece of forest with a creek in the back and another pond further over. Yeah. We had a fox actually, um, living there.
[00:19:37] I haven't seen it unfortunately this year, but we had a fox in grouses and the fireflies.
[00:19:42] And the fireflies, I couldn't believe there are fireflies out here. I haven't seen fireflies for so many years. I think they're nearly extinct in so many areas. And we looked last, last spring, it was, we looked to the pond here and it was just amazing to see the hundreds and hundreds of fireflies.
[00:19:57] So that was very encouraging to see how much wildlife is still out here. And insects, it's just the amount cause it's really, you probably don't notice when you don't see it otherwise. But in Europe, in many areas, and there's just absolutely no insects left anymore. It's, it's really shocking. You go and there's nothing flying around anymore.
[00:20:15] And so it was so nice to be here and see, I mean, of course you have mosquitoes and annoying things too, but it's just part of it. But that also feeds, feeds the insect wild life and, and the birds, right? Like so, so it's important to have this variety.
[00:20:30] Tina Pittaway: And while Annette's obsession with fruit trees keeps her greenhouse business moving full steam ahead, her love of nature and devotion to ecosystems also has her focusing some of her know-how on restoring the forest on her property.
[00:20:44] Annette Clarke: I would like to bring in a few more trees for shelter, for food source for us, and for for the wildlife. So that's the main goal is actually, I don't wanna make it into dense forest, but at least planting some large trees. So, I mean, you see when the squirrels find a nut tree or the birds in the fall, I mean, this is the original bird feeder before we started hanging out bird feeders.
[00:21:06] They, they have the seeds and the long grass, or they have the berry bushes and all this food is clinging on over the winter and feeds, feeds of wildlife. Right? So, so that's what we're trying to do. I'm going to plant a lot of rows of, of hatches and berry bearing, uh, bushes and trees for the. For the wildlife here too.
[00:21:25] Tina Pittaway: The reception to Annette's exotic fruit nursery so far has been really encouraging.
[00:21:30] National media has covered it in magazine pieces. All of the local television news programs have sent crews here.
[00:21:37] Annette Clarke: Yeah, it was amazing the the responses and it was so nice to already, cuz we also knew here, so it's so nice to already feel so much part of the community and see the support. We had garden clubs phoning and even people from the state, someone just yesterday contacted me, they wanna have a fruit basket. So it's, we are not even open yet, but yeah, no, but it's amazing and uh, yeah, feel very welcome here.
[00:22:09] Tina Pittaway: If you'd like to hear more stories like this and help new listeners discover this podcast, make sure to rate Countless Journeys on your favorite podcast app, or leave us a review. Countless Journeys comes to you from the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, located at the Halifax Seaport. I'm Tina.
[00:22:27] Bye for now.