Corbin's Apricot

Spokane put three trees on its heritage register, and one of them came out of somebody's kitchen garden. Former residents of the D.C. Corbin House remembered a working garden directly behind the building, above the rock wall. Everything else about it is gone. The apricot is the remnant, and the city's register says so in as many words. A 2012 survey called it a hundred years old, which puts it somewhere around 110 to 115 now, with the usual slack that a round number carries. Prunus armeniaca, the Armenian plum, is not a species that does centuries: commercial orchards pull apricots out and replant long before a tree gets near one. This one was never pulled out, because the garden around it stopped being a garden and became a public park. D.C. Corbin built railroads into the Inland Northwest and a mansion on the South Hill to go with them. The mansion is the Corbin Art Center now, the grounds are open to anybody, and the tree that once supplied a kitchen is still fruiting on them. It is history rather than spectacle: a modest fruit tree with a documented job, standing a couple of minutes from the other two trees on that register, a champion-sized horse chestnut and an elm in the restored gardens next door. Nobody has recorded a girth. If you have a tape measure, we would take the number.