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D E P T.OFMONIKERS
WO U LDSMELLASSWEET?“
Regard your good name as the rich-
est jewel you can possibly be pos-
sessed of,” Socrates said. But how can
you be sure the name you choose for your
child is good in the first place? There are
experts for that. “If you look at the most
popular baby names, it’s such a telltale
sign of our cultural values and our aspi-
rations,” Taylor A. Humphrey, a profes-
sional baby namer, said the other day. She
was wearing an emerald floral dress; be-
side her was her Havanese, named Willa
(ranked No. 349 in 2020, for humans).
Last year, she helped name more than
a hundred kids. Indecisive parents can
choose from Humphrey’s services, which
start at fifteen hundred dollars and range
from a phone call and a bespoke name
list (based on parents’ answers to a ques-
tionnaire) to a genealogical investigation,
with the aim of ferreting out old family
names. A ten-thousand-dollar optioninvolves selecting a name that will be
on-brand with a parent’s business. Some
also hire Humphrey as a doula.
On a recent evening, Humphrey, who
was in the Bay Area visiting family,
phoned a client in Wisconsin who was
expecting a baby boy via surrogate. The
client liked the name Soren, but worried
that it was too similar to the name of a
colleague’s child, Oren.
“Yes, it rhymes, but it would have a
totally different name meaning,” Hum-
phrey said. “And it is kind of a Scandi-
navian name, and that’s your heritage.”
They decided to review other options.
“I’m going to put them into three cat-
egories—a yes, a no, or a maybe,” Hum-
phrey said.
“Adler, no. That’s a pub down the road
from us,” the client said. “Alexander, no.
Ansel, no. Arlo, no. Asher, no. Astro, no.
Axel, no. Bodhi, no. That’s so popular.
Brave is cute.”
“Sometimes you see a name like Brave
on this list and you think, I’m just not
going to name my kid Brave,” Hum-
phrey said. “But it might be worth put-
ting on a maybe list as a thought for a
middle name.”
“Yeah, I’d maybe that.”
Humphrey, who is thirty-three, has
been obsessed with baby names for most
of her life. As a child, she pored over
baby-name books that her mother got
for her from the library. When she grad-
uated from N.Y.U., she tried other ca-
reers, including screenwriting. “The most
exciting part of that entire venture was
picking out the names of the characters,”“No matter how early we leave, it seems we always hit traffic.”the numerous ways I’ve died. I’m hop-
ing it’s not a career trend.’ And it was!”
Later, Van Aken created a project called
the Tree of 40 Fruit. “I collected all these
varieties, and then I found out that I
had some of the only existing ones,” he
said. The realization birthed the Open
Orchard, which was supposed to take
three years to complete; it took eight. It
opens to the public this month.
Van Aken rode a golf cart to the or-
chard, nearby. He wandered the rows re-
citing origin stories: the Newtown Pip-
pin apple was found in Gershom Moore’s
swamp around 1700; the Washington
Gage plum is said to have sprouted in
1814, from another tree, which was struck
by lightning. He pointed. “This is the
Stuyvesant Pear,” he said. The governor
planted one in his bouwerie as early as
- “Supposedly, it’s the first grafted
tree in the U.S. The variety is a Bon Chré-
tien, which translates to Good Chris-
tian”—but maybe not if you asked Johnny
Appleseed. Nearby was a George IV
peach, born around 1821, when someone
dropped a pit by the ferry on Broad Street.
(“It sprouts, it grows, somebody walks
by, tastes it, it’s amazing.”) The trees took
years to bear fruit. It was immediately
devoured by squirrels.
The most difficult part of the proj-
ect was finding living samples. Van Aken
had an apple guy in Maine, a stone-fruit
guy in California. The rootstock came
from Oregon. He had to get special phy-
tosanitary permits for each state—ex-
cept New Jersey. “They’re, like, Just drag
that shit in here!” he said. Fruit sleuths
were consulted. “There’s these guys, the
Apple Explorers. A bunch of old dudes!”
One was retired F.B.I. “They found the
Streaked Pippin, which originated on
Long Island, out in the remnants of an
orchard in Washington. That’s the hot
news in apples.”
Back at the nursery, he was greeted
by his assistant, Jeremy Tarr, a lanky, tat-
tooed fellow. They grabbed clipboards
and took inventory. As part of the proj-
ect, Van Aken is distributing trees to
their neighborhoods of origin. He’s also
experimenting with old recipes, using
centuries-old cookbooks—pemmican,
plum clafoutis, Prunes of Brignoles, New
York pudding. One was for an intricate
layered apple wafer. “It’s called the dish
of the tsars,” Van Aken said. The recipe
calls for apples with a specific pectin
content, which are baked, liquefied,
whipped, layered, rendered into me-
ringue, and then baked again for sixteen
hours. It took him an entire day to make.
“I hand it to Jeremy, and I go, ‘What do
you think?’” he said. Jeremy chewed,
shrugged, and said, “It’s all right.”
—Zach Helfand