So I went back to concentrating on the trees. Before I had called the historic horticulturalist at Monticello, I went to Thomas Jefferson’s home to look at his gardens. I knew their orchards might have Albermarle Pippin trees, which I’d discovered were the same breed as Yellow Newtown Pippins. They did, so I took pictures of them for the set designers. They were taken in February, so you could see how they were pruned, but that didn’t help for the leaves and the flowers. But when I called Monticello and asked about what the fruit looked like, the horticulturalist told me how many branches and flowers a young tree would have, which helped me understand what the tree would look like.

The picture of a 19th-century orchard started to become more clear. It seems that the vast majority of California orchards were planted in straight lines, in squares. There were questions about the distance between trees. In a 1900 text, the author shows how to grid orchard squares of 10 to 24 feet. According to Edward J. Wickson’s 1900 book, earlier orchards were overcrowded, and you really needed 25 to 30 feet between trees. By the 1920s, F. W. Allen’s Apple Growing in California was claiming that Wickson’s 25-30 feet between trees led to overcrowding and that 40 feet was better. An orchard in the 1890s, then, might have left anywhere between 10 feet (and perhaps less) to 25 feet between the trees.