Espalier Train the Wall

Noon in a walled kitchen garden. A blank stretch of warm plaster, two copper training wires, and one young tree at the foot of it all. Train the wall — and make it bear. Espalier is a growth-design puzzle with a hook you can read in one screenshot: a fruit tree grown FLAT against a wall, the way real head gardeners have trained them for centuries. Tap the wall to grow. Wood rises cell by cell, and where it meets a training wire it can turn and run sideways — a cordon, the level arm of a true espalier. That is the whole verb. The puzzle is what you do with it. Because the sun is directly overhead, and your tree casts its own shade. A cordon bears fruit only where the sky above it is open: grow a second tier carelessly and it shades the harvest below into leaves. Stone ledges block the light too; old windows let it through. Every single move costs sap from a fixed budget, so a wrong…