My grandmother loved baking and was, therefore, an excellent baker. I can still see her massaging flour, sugar, eggs, yeast, butter and milk into dough and injecting the pastry with jam to make buhhteljni. I can still hear her saying to her, a sustainable farmer, baking was the closest she could get to “the world of art”. I regret never telling her that even though she wasn’t graced with the life of an artist, she was nevertheless weaving something larger than her: a culture.

Maybe she understood what she was doing after all. Once, she instructed me to never follow her recipes, but instead to adapt them however I saw fit. A culture, she was essentially saying, should be modified in line with the tastes and needs of the times.

Well. I have altered most of my grandmother’s recipes, apart from the one—her recipe for potica, a traditional Slovenian pastry usually served at holiday, birthday and special celebrations. In essence, it is a roll made of leavened paper-thin dough, most often stuffed with walnut filling and raisins.

Calling potica a “filled roll”, makes it seem easy to prepare, but it requires hours of work. The most painful part is grinding the walnuts. Before my grandmother began using a grinder, we filled a bag with walnuts and beat the bag with a hammer, until the nuts turned to paste.

Ah, but why not simply buy a kilo of ground Californian walmuts? Oh! Because the secret to the best potica known to humans is walnuts from a tree that grows on my grandmother’s farm. This 15-meter-tall tree is an amusement park for crows and insects, and is also often populated by couragcous children. It bears sweetest walnuts.

Was, bore, I should write. In the past decade, the 30-year-old tree has changed. At first, the romantic in me wanted to believe it was mourning my grandmother’s death and just couldn’t yield sweet nuts any more. Next, I turned to common sense. Walnut harvests, I told myself, differ from season to season, so our half-empty baskets was nothing to worry about. However, after the fifth poor harves t with dry, bitter fruit, I understood that I was witnessing something better known as decay.

In suitable conditions, walnut trees in our region can live up to 100 years and yield nuts until they’re middle-aged. But the circumstances for that particular potica tree have worsened. The trees endure frost and snow, heat and strong winds, storms and floods, and heavily polluted air, water, soil.

Well, I spotted a sign of hope for poticas early this year. A sapling next to the dying tree. Perhaps the dying tree delivered all its remaining nutrients to this sapling, whispering: “The preservationists are already here, trust me.”