In Clark Ashton Smith’s “Abandoned Plum-Orchard,” a plum orchard appears not in blossom or fruit but in winter, bare except for what has attached itself to the branches. The title names the loss: an orchard implies planted rows, harvest, human care, and the word “abandoned” tells us those have gone. What remains is a “dying croft” where “lichen, mistletoe” grow “aloft” and, in the final line, “leaf the winter trees.” The central idea is not simply decay but replacement. When cultivation ends, tougher opportunists move in; the orchard puts on a kind of false foliage, life that signals the ending of the orchard’s intended life. The poem turns absence into a strange, spectral presence.
The poem is built as a single delayed sentence. The first line is a list of two organisms and a direction—“lichen, mistletoe, aloft”—without yet saying what they are doing. The second line places them “in the dying croft,” grounding the scene in an old word for a small farm enclosure. Only the third line supplies the verb: “leaf the winter trees.” That ordering matters. We see the invaders and the dying place before we understand that they are doing what the trees themselves should do. The verb “leaf” is normally intransitive: a tree leafs out in spring. Here it becomes transitive, with lichen and mistletoe acting on the trees. The plum trees are not leafing; they are being leaved by organisms of neglect. The grammar makes the living tree strangely passive, as if the orchard has been taken over.
The movement of the lines is also carefully compressed. “Aloft” and “croft” rhyme, binding the height of the branches to the low, failing farm. “Trees,” which closes the poem, is left unrhymed, giving the ending a flat, open finality—no answering echo, no completed couplet. Each short line carries two or three strong stresses rather than a strict meter, so the poem feels like a bare branch, stripped of decorative syllables. The sounds work by repetition: the “l” and “m” of “lichen, mistletoe” return in “leaf,” while “winter trees” narrows into long “e” sounds. The words themselves are divided between the natural and the human. “Lichen” and “mistletoe” name specific organisms; “croft” and “orchard” name ways of working land. Together they imply a landscape where two orders meet and one is losing.
The imagery is crucial because lichen and mistletoe are not innocent replacements for leaves. Lichen is slow-growing, crustlike, often pale or grey-green; mistletoe is an evergreen parasite. Neither is the broad green foliage of a healthy plum tree. By making them “leaf” the winter trees, the poem suggests a false spring, a covering that looks like life but belongs to sickness and age. “Winter” matters too: it is the season when plum trees would naturally be bare, but here the bareness is not allowed to be simple. The branches are occupied. The poem never mentions a plum, blossom, or fruit within the verse itself; those exist only in the title. That omission is part of the meaning. The orchard is defined by what no longer appears, and the poem offers only substitutes: lichen where leaves should be, mistletoe where fruit might hang.
What makes the poem significant is its ability to make an entire social and ecological situation out of eleven words. It is a miniature elegy for abandoned farmland and an uncanny image of nature persisting after human order fails. The “dying croft” is not only a dead patch of ground; it is a whole pattern of tending, planting, and harvesting that has stopped. Yet the lichen and mistletoe continue. In their small, parasitic way, they clothe the trees in what the poem calls leaves, so that death and persistence become almost impossible to tell apart. That ambiguity gives the poem its quiet, unsettling power.