AS I write these words, I stare out of the window for inspiration every few seconds towards the apple tree that we emasculated last autumn in the hope that it might perk up this year.

It has reputedly spent aeons gathering lichen and putting forth lame excuses for growth - to wit, small red leaves and barren flowers which flee at the slightest hint of a breeze. The theory was that it needed judicious pruning for the sap to believe that this year it might be worth rising with a little more alacrity than hitherto.

But I think we might have overdone it. The sad specimen looks at the moment like the hand of the wicked witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and we all know what she had in her basket - poisoned fruit - before she was chased off a cliff by animals of remarkable coordination and intelligence.

If I look beyond our tree in time, I contemplate my paternal grandfather's garden, a plot of such ordered and reproductive bounty that after fifty years I can accurately recall its detail.

As a former miner who had lived through the Depression, he knew the value of growing his own crops.

In fact, my father told me that if Grandpa Jarrett hadn't supplied the table with fruit and vegetables during the miners, strike of 1926 - or it may have been the earlier dispute of 1921 - the family would have starved.

Children of the 1960s in these parts are fond of quoting this sort of scary anecdote, partly because they were interested in politics and partly from a desire to relate their good fortune (they had left austerity behind at last) to the deprivations of their mothers and fathers.

Our apple tree, poor thing, stands in relation to the one of my grandfather's that produced crunchy Worcesters, in the bottom left hand corner of the garden as you surveyed it from the back of the house. There were five in all, each cropping a different variety.

For some reason that real gardeners like my wife will readily explain, he used to let me store cooking apples in drawers by placing them individually on old copies of the Daily Mirror, the ones that weren't neatly drawn and quartered and attached to a hook in the outside loo.

I would take a peek every few weeks to watch the uncorrupted green skins of the 'cookers', turn ochre. When eaten, they were tart and dry.

Then there were Coxes. To eat a whole pippin, was to reach pleasant surfeit. And who could bite into a russet, and not feel that overcoming the resistance of its woody skin was like being let into a supersweet secret?

My maternal grandfather, also a former miner and foundry labourer, had turned his garden into a pleasure ground for chickens. I would dupe the hens with china eggs then collect the real things when they were still warm.

He grew his crops at an allotment a half mile away in an elevated position, from where in the 1950s we watched the roads of what would be Cwmbran new town being drawn in red virgin soil by earthmovers.

It looked like an orgy of serpents. Pretty soon his lease on self-sufficiency would be ended by house-building.

Grandpa Jarrett, too, bequeathed an example rather than a going concern, as his garden became a lawn with just one of the five apple trees remaining.

Beyond its prime it continued to drop fruit and was doing so when my parents celebrated their golden wedding al fresco beneath its boughs.

I can't see our lame tree doing the same. But we live in hope buttressed by precedent.