Around 1440, an English gardening poem attributed to Jon Gardener described how to grow vegetables and herbs, save seed, propagate plants, and graft fruit trees. In The Feate of Gardening, Gardener gives surprisingly practical instructions for grafting. He describes cutting the tree stock with a saw, smoothing it with a knife, preparing the scion, fitting the pieces together, and protecting the graft afterward. For those of us growing grafted pawpaws, apples, pears, or other fruit trees today, the basic idea is familiar. A seed-grown fruit tree is a new genetic individual. If we want to preserve a particular variety, grafting allows us to keep that variety growing by joining living tissue from the plant we want to another compatible plant. Gardener was writing about apples and pears, not pawpaws, but the underlying principle has carried forward for centuries. What interests me just as much is how much observation sits behind a skill like this. Someone had to notice that cut plant tissues could join, learn which combinations worked, determine when the timing was right, and then pass that knowledge forward. The Feate of Gardening did exactly that. It preserved practical gardening knowledge in English at a time when books were still copied by hand. The surviving manuscript is considered the earliest existing English account devoted to gardening. There is much more in this little work that we can come back to. Gardener discusses seed saving, seasonal planting, propagation, and a long list of useful herbs. Even his planting dates raise an interesting question for us today. Rather than simply copying a date from fifteenth-century England, we can ask what seasonal conditions and signs in nature surrounded that date. The calendar changes with place and climate although our relationships between plant growth, season, and timing remain. If you are growing a grafted fruit tree, what are you growing?