When I first moved to L.A., I was doing a lot of walks around my neighborhood. I used to live in Pico Union, and then I moved to Echo Park, and now I live in Historic Filipinotown, but everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve always done a lot of walking, and I noticed pretty quickly how abundant the land was. There were so many fruit trees everywhere, and I was just really inspired by that.
I remember the first tree that I ever picked from was a lemon tree right off the Rampart exit on the 101, and I marked it on my Google Maps, so I would remember that I could come back there for lemons. Ever since then, I’ve been marking fruit on my map, and now I have a crazy map where you can’t see streets, you can’t see any highways, because it’s just blue flags everywhere. I feel like a collector in a lot of ways, mapping out all the fruit trees that are accessible by the sidewalk.
On my map, I have a lot of avocado, loquats, banana trees (though bananas technically aren’t trees, they’re herbaceous). A lot of citrus, like limes, pomelos, lemons. I have guava and some papaya trees on here. I also sometimes do herbs, so I’ll have rosemary. A lot of fig, lavender and stone fruit — peach trees, nectarines. We have passion fruit vines everywhere, and elderberry. Right next to Pijja Palace, there’s a huge bush of Thai basil. An interesting part of the process, too, is learning fruit that I didn’t know about, like loquats and pink peppercorn. I have 583 of these trees saved.
Now, when I go home to Miami, I’ve started marking fruit there. Miami is where I found my love for fruit. I had so many bananas in my backyard and coconuts when I was growing up. My mom had planted this tree called a cocktail tree, which is essentially a citrus tree that has different types of citrus grafted onto it. There was a lemon, a clementine, lime. It’s been fun going to different cities — I have some marked in Croatia when I was there last summer. It’s become a practice of just orienting myself on a new land and having this other understanding of a place I love.
I really wanted this shoot to be a celebration of fruit and of the land that has given me so much. Oftentimes, our relationship with fruit is that we’re eating it, so it’s more internal. It’s nourishing us. But for this shoot, I loved the idea of having them on the outside, adorning ourselves with them. I was so excited that Keyla Marquez re-created these fruit pieces, like making a loquat necklace. Those loquats technically aren’t fully in season yet. When I was driving around, and Keyla was looking too, there were just green loquats everywhere. And then, on my way to the shoot, I saw a loquat tree that had ripe fruit on it. So I pulled over really quick — which is not unlike me, I’m always pulling over for fruit trees — and was able to harvest some. And loquats you can’t buy in stores, because they go bad very quickly. So that feels like a very specific L.A., local thing. Especially after the wildfires, there is a lot of mourning for the land, and the fact that these trees are still producing fruit and still nourishing us and still providing even throughout something really traumatic that’s happened to our community, to the land and the animals, I think it’s just so beautiful.
—As told to Elisa Wouk Almino
aliana mt is a Jewish Cuban-American photographer and fiber artist based in Los Angeles. aliana’s artistic vision is rooted in her exploration of the unconscious mind and deeply influenced by her fascination with dreams.
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