I pieced together my vision of what an orchard would look like from an array of sources. A book on the subject from 1900 described the ideal conditions, but I was wary of basing the scene on an ideal.

So I looked at photos, but never found the perfect one. One 1920s image that showed young trees in a field from ground level, with people in it, gave a sense of scale and layout. Another view of Watsonville from about the same era suggested that farmers did lay out their trees symmetrically. The text of J. C. Folger and S. M. Thomson, Commercial Apple Industry of North America, declared that “a large number of the present orchards were set out in the period between 1880 and 1900.” And as I knew that Watsonville got into apples in the 1890s, I thought that made using a later image as a source more appropriate. Between all the different materials, I cobbled together a sense of the ways that fruit trees were laid out. Taken together, it seemed as if orchardists actually did follow the ideal laid out in the “How To” books.