There’s a peach tree on our farm that shouldn’t still be here.

It’s not the prettiest. It’s twisted, gnarled, and frankly, it looks like it’s been through hell, which, in a way, it has. When the Camp Fire tore through Paradise in 2018, it destroyed just about everything in its path. Buildings. Memories. All manners of life. But this peach tree? It survived.

Sort of.

Its main trunk was scorched and shattered beyond recovery. What grows now are technically suckers—resilient shoots that sprouted from the rootstock and reached toward the sun with all the stubbornness of a tree that refused to die. The peaches it produces aren’t the kind you’d pick for a summer pie. They’re small, hard, and mostly pit. But that’s not really the point. Because while those peaches may not fill a basket, that tree still flowers. And when it does, it becomes a vital pollinator for the rest of our orchard, contributing to the life and abundance that surrounds it.

Even crab apples do that. On their own, they’re bitter and barely edible. But they bloom early, draw in bees, and set the stage for everything else to fruit. There’s a kind of ancestral wisdom in that, an understanding that not everything has to be directly useful to be valuable. Some things serve the greater good simply by being there.

As a kid, I didn’t understand that. My grandparents had crab apple trees along the side of their yard in San Jose, California, and every year I had to rake them up when they dropped. It wasn’t fun. They weren’t even tasty. I didn’t understand why anyone would intentionally grow something so useless. But now I do. Now I understand. Those trees weren’t there for the fruit; they were there for the flowers. For the bees. For the life they made possible.

I think about that a lot when I work the land.

I think about my grandparents and the food they grew. The peach trees and the artichokes. My grandfather’s peaches were legendary… sun-warmed, juicy, the kind you bite into and end up with juice running down your chin and elbow. My own peaches haven’t quite caught up to his. Not yet. But my artichoke plants? Let’s just say he’d be proud, and probably a little jealous.

The garden is one place I connect with them. Not in some metaphorical, abstract sense, but in the soil, the sun, and the fruit of my labor. When I bend down to pluck a tomato, I’m not just thinking about canning or salsa or sauce. I’m thinking about lineage. I’m thinking about my Sicilian, Portuguese, and Hispanic ancestors. These are people I’ve never met, but who knew the value of a backyard harvest. Who understood the sacredness of food shared at a table. Who passed down flavors, techniques, and instincts not through lectures, but through generations of hands in the dirt.

Food is memory. Food is ritual. Food is ancestry.

And when we engage with it—when we grow it, prepare it, offer it to those we love—we don’t just honor the past. We stand on its shoulders.

That’s the thing. A lot of folks talk about “honoring their ancestors” as though it means preserving every belief, every custom, every near-sighted prejudice they held. But to truly honor those who came before us is not to become a museum of their worldviews. It’s to become a living extension of their best values. Their resilience. Their creativity. Their care for the earth, for family, for community.

We don’t preserve the past by freezing it in time. We preserve it by allowing it to evolve.

This has been a recurring theme in my life, and it was central to my book The Wisdom of Hobbits. The Shire, to me, represents balance—between tradition and change, between rootedness and growth, between being ordinary and extraordinary. It isn’t about rejecting all modernity or romanticizing the old days (though some Hobbits indeed argue for such a thing). It is about holding both in tension, about knowing that the best way forward often involves looking back, learning, and then reimagining.

My garden is my Shire.

It’s where I kneel down to thank the earth and my ancestors in the same breath. It’s where I get dirt under my nails and remember my grandparents with every sprouting leaf. It’s where last year’s pepper seeds—saved, dried, and replanted—become this year’s sauces. And those sauces? They carry the fingerprints of centuries of culture, migration, hardship, and joy.

When we connect with our ancestors through food and land, we discover a kind of progressive traditionalism. We preserve the old ways, not by hoarding them, but by letting them breathe. By adapting them. By using their wisdom to inform something new. We remember that even a battered peach tree with sucker growth and inedible fruit still has value. We remember that even crab apples—the underdogs of the orchard—have their place. And we remember that the food we grow is never just food. It’s connection. It’s continuity. It’s communion with those who came before and those who will come after.

So whether I’m harvesting artichokes that would make my grandparents beam, or waiting (not so patiently) for my peaches to measure up, I know I’m not doing this alone. I’m tending more than a garden. I’m tending a legacy.

And that’s sacred.