The Last Grove
In the midst of an urban landscape, John Adams '66 is preserving a bittersweet oasis of the past.

Story by Susan Straight / Photos by Felipe Dupuoy

Standing amid the Valencia orange trees of his family’s century-old grove, John Adams ’66 holds very still for a moment. “Inside here,’’ he says. “the temperature is cooler in the summer, you can’t hear the cars, and it’s like another time.” He moves on, brushing the branches that carry a light crop of fruit for this year. The oranges are still green and will stay on the tree very late, into January, when Blue Banner Company will send a crew of workers to pick the oranges for juice. In a good year, more than 25 tons of oranges will be harvested.

Adams’ 10 acres form the last working orange grove in the foothill city of Rialto, wedged between Fontana and San Bernardino, and once home to 10,000 acres of citrus.

His grandfather, V.R. Cooley, bought the land at the close of the 19th century and planted it with Valencia oranges, grown on various rootstock, in 1907. Adams lives here with his 93-year-old mother, Jean Adams, who was born in the Craftsman bungalow her father built on the property.

John Adams only left the family farm for college, majoring in botany at Pomona and earning his master’s in the same field from Claremont Graduate University (later topped off with a PhD in soil sciences from UC Riverside) before returning in 1968. Ever since, he has served as the keeper of a verdant, historic island that is moored in the city’s past but surrounded by the prosaic present of tract homes, graffiti-covered block walls and speeding traffic.

This island is certainly not a private resort. Teenagers leave behind bottles and trash, some of which recently blocked an irrigation line. Adams is followed companionably by dozens of feral chickens, the first of which migrated over wood fences and block walls from nearby homes; they have now spent years reproducing in the safety of the trees. Rabbits also linger nearby, reverting to the wild after being dumped in the grove. Cats, raccoons and opossums prowl at night, though the prevalence of housing erased the coyotes from this area. But the lowly gophers are what nearly did in the grove.

In a prescient illustration of what rapid growth can do to an agricultural area, the city of Rialto not only allowed huge housing tracts in the 1970s, but also encouraged industrial expansion in the 1990s. Adams says the school district attempted to purchase the grove property for construction of a new school. Feeling pressured, he took district officials to nearby open land designated for warehouses and suggested that the new school be located there. It was. But all the new construction, especially of a nearby warehouse, forced the local gopher population to seek refuge in his grove.

“It seems like there were gophers under every tree,” he says. “There were a thousand trees, and each gopher had three or four little gophers. Thousands of gophers.” They ate the roots of the trees, damaged the irrigation systems, and their tunnels were intricate labyrinths where they hid from Adams and his traps.

“For six or seven hours a day, seven days a week, all summer, for several years all I did was try to trap gophers. Sometimes I’d get so exhausted I wouldn’t know which way I’d come or gone in the grove, and I had to look for my own footsteps to see where I’d just been.”

Last year, the grove celebrated its 100th anniversary with a huge gathering, amid a heavy blossom of fragrant white blooms, Adams says with pride. “And people come every year for these oranges. They tell me they don’t want any other oranges because the taste of these is like nothing else. You can’t get these oranges anywhere but here.”

On a recent December afternoon, the ground is damp and dark from welcome rains, and the trees shine in the late sunlight. For me, there is no other landscape like an orange grove, and having grown up playing in Riverside’s nearby groves, eating freshly picked oranges, seeing the glistening segments of fruit encased in their white-velvet-lined rind, this is a forest worth saving. Adams inspects a few new gopher holes while he walks, places where recent pruning has been done, and branches stunted by high winds. Farming is a constant vigil, a combination of hard work, weather, luck and persistence.

This oasis of trees inside the endless grid of houses, industry and sandy vacant lots has not gone unnoticed. Spotting a few new weeds sprouting between the rows, Adams mentions how many people walk the furrows surreptitiously searching for something. “Sometimes I’d see somebody carrying full bags, and when I’d come out and talk to them, thinking they were taking oranges, I’d look in the bag and it was full of weeds,” he says. It turns out that his unwanted “weeds”—parslane, lamb’s quarter, amaranthus—are desirable in various ethnic culinary traditions. Even the cheese weed—a small plant with orange balls that look like cheese—is sought after.

He grins. “If somebody wants to steal oranges, I make them pay for a bag. But if they want to pick my weeds, I have no trouble with that.”

Walking the perimeter of the property, pointing out where towering eucalyptus windbreaks once protected the trees from the fierce Santa Anas in fall and cold strong northern winds in winter, Adams is really telling a story. This grove survived, he says, for two main reasons. His grandfather laid out the irrigation furrows and systems from east to west, rather than the north-to-south pattern that almost every other area farmer used. If Adams’ grandfather had followed the typical pattern, the irrigation system would have been disrupted by a drainage channel that later had to be installed from east to west across the grove to draw away water that builds up in a nearby street during heavy rain. Also, his grove was planted with a wide variety of rootstock, which is the base tree on which fruiting varieties are grafted. In the late 1930s, a virus known as tristesia wiped out whole counties of citrus in Southern California, from Los Angeles to Orange, because their trees were planted on sour orange rootstock, which was resistant to root rot from flooding but very susceptible to tristesia. The Adams grove was planted on Troyer citrange, grapefruit, budded lemons, and sweet orange rootstock, which he points out in the grove now, where odd fruit sometimes emerges from the trees and reveals the original source.

Adams’ extensive knowledge of the botany and history of his hometown, as well as his particularly focused passion for maintaining this grove as an intrinsic part of Rialto, made him the perfect author for the book Rialto, in the Images of America series published by Arcadia. The book came out in 2004 and features the comprehensive history of the city which was once a dark green sea of trees punctuated by lovely Victorian homes. (Jean Adams’ paintings are also part of the book.) Adams and his brother Jim, a professor at Stanford, are shown as children in the grove, which was a magical place to grow up, and in his voice while he tours the property now, strong echoes of that past are clear.

“Along the driveway there was the original windbreak. Red gum,” he says, pointing to where hedges now stand near the barn. “Those trees were 150 feet tall when we cut them down, because they might fall on the houses over there.” He stares at a few shorter trees which sprouted from the cut trunks. “In late August, the red gums would grow chicken fungus.”

What?

“It was bright yellow, like foam rubber, and we’d be so excited to see it. We’d pull it off the trunks, it would come off in a big chunk, and my mother would fry it up.”

Jean Adams concurs with a smile, continuing on about the fungus known as chicken of the woods. “I put it in a frying pan with some butter and let it simmer for awhile. Yes. It was so good.”

When I leave, John and Jean Adams give me three oranges, and I eat them at my own kitchen sink. They’re right. There’s nothing like fruit from this kind of island in our urban landscape. As I look out my window, facing the northern mountains near Adams’ grove, I envision him as caretaker, patiently walking his forest, tending his trees, his soil and part of Southern California’s past.