Lifelong love of trees bore fruit

The valley lost a real good apple recently — Rod McIver.

We'd been warned, myself directly when I met him and then en masse with many of his friends and admirers at this spring’s annual roundup of the Citizens for a Better Flathead, where one of the organizers said in introducing board members, “Who here knows ‘Johnny Appleseed’?” 

The crowd assembled at Flathead Valley Community College murmured. She gave the update on McIver’s condition and said that hospice had been called. 

McIver had been as upfront about his health when I met him one chilly afternoon in October 2022. As a newish journalist on the hunt for column ideas in the Flathead, I contacted him at the urging of my distant cousin Katrina Mendrey, who had done work on heirloom apple varieties with McIver when she grafted trees for the Montana Heritage Orchard Project through Montana State. 

Her eyes lit up when talking about McIver. I wouldn’t merely meet an apple expert but a local luminary. 

I already had an inkling from his website, A Montana Home Orchard Project, which cautioned that no one should assume he had technical capabilities: “Don’t be fooled by this blog, it was made by my daughter.”  

Dressed in a brown barn coat and bucket hat, he met me in the driveway of the place he bought on Rose Crossing in 1998, mainly because he was “too broke to buy anything in Missoula,” which had been his base for smokejumping for more than 20 years.  

Admitting in his coastal South Carolina accent that he was slow to roll in the morning, he looked ahead to a productive day after falling behind from “getting radiated.”  

He checked the sky for good chore weather. “My goal is to straighten up this place before I dump it on my kids,” he said. “Sometimes I think it’s keeping me alive, sometimes killing me.” 

McIver showed me around his 3.5-acre "redneck Garden of Eden,” including a “loafing shed,” a granary and Subarus in varying stages of decomposition. Near the house he pointed out his first trees, saying, “I’d plant trees by trucklight. I was feverish to get going.” 

Like the trees, his passion grew. At the back of the lot the trees fell into rows. “This is where I started being serious,” he said, pointing to the dozen lines of 50 trees each. We checked out chestnut and centennial apple crab, then enigma, liberty and Williams pride apple trees. 

Eventually, the property became home to over 200 different fruits, including apples, crabapples, apple crabs and pears.  

Tromping about the orchard, McIver shook down trees for the last fruits of the season and whipped out a pocketknife to slice off samples. 

He mentioned having u-dig nursery days in the spring, around April. He said of the ideal planting weather, “If you’re not miserable planting your trees, then your trees will be miserable."  

I made a mental note to time my story for a u-dig day. But springs passed, and now McIver. 

At our last snack break in the orchard, I had asked him to name his favorite fruit.  

He chewed, then grinned, “The one in my hand.” 

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.