For more than a decade, Texas Orchards was one of the few places where people could pick peaches in Waller County. Old photographs show a vast expanse of peach trees aligned in rows, dusted in light pink blossoms.
"You should have seen the sunset and the sunrise out there," said Krishan Magon, 73, who bought the land for the orchard in the mid-1990s and tended to it over much of the next two decades. "It was so gorgeous."
Magon sold the property on Old Houston Highway about four and a half years ago to a manufacturing company, but with the understanding that he would retain ownership of the trees and continue to harvest them. Or so he thought.
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Last fall, the trees, some 10,000 of them by Magon's count, suddenly vanished.
Now the orchard is at the center of a legal fight pitting Magon against pipe manufacturer Tex-Tube and its affiliate, TT Investment Company, which holds the deed to the property.
Magon contends in his lawsuit that Tex-Tube and TT Investment owe him $1.5 million for the trees he left on the farm. The companies, however, maintain that they owe Magon nothing, saying he sold the trees along with the land. The case goes to trial in March.
Although Magon's attorney, David Mestemaker, said the disappearance of the trees has little impact on the lawsuit, their destruction came as a shock to Magon.
'Bothering me'
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"It's bothering me so much that someone could do such a destruction for no gain," Magon said.
Private property owners have been fined by the city of Houston for knocking down trees on public land or in the public right of way, such as when the city last fall collected $300,000 in damages from a businessman over the removal of six oak trees on Kirby Drive. But Magon's trees were located on private property.
Magon moved to the Houston area in the early 1980s from Kenya, where his family, which is of Indian descent, had lived for generations. Magon's sister and brother-in-law already were here, and he figured Houston was a place where his children could get a good education. Also, it wasn't too cold.
The property was a peach orchard back then, too, but it had fallen into disrepair. And so Magon, a fruit farmer by training, decided to rehabilitate it.
In the beginning, he sold only fruit: peaches, plums, pears, figs. "People came from all over the world," Magon said, estimating that about 1,000 people picked his fruit each year.
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Former customers recalled the orchard fondly, saying it grew to be well-known in the area, which is about an hour northwest of downtown Houston.
"It was real popular," said longtime Waller resident Ernestine Avila, 74, who visited Texas Orchards each year to pick peaches. "They used to send us a card in the mail and say: the peaches are ready."
'Huge peaches'
Jami Dauphin, too, remembered the orchard well.
"They were huge peaches," said Dauphin, 55. "They were lovely."
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But Magon found that selling fruit for just three months of the year wasn't enough to make ends meet. And so, in the early 2000s, he diversified to landscaping trees, planting crape myrtles and magnolias, maples and live oaks. At its peak, the farm was home to more than 20,000 trees, Magon said.
It was never the plan to sell the farm so soon, but Magon said that family health concerns precluded him from keeping up the 88-acre property, including the 81 acres on which he grew trees. In the summer of 2010, he negotiated to sell the property for about $1.7 million, court records show.
"It was there and then it was gone," Avila said of the orchard.
The farm closed quietly, its departure coming in the midst of a decline in the number of orchards statewide, which dropped more than 20 percent from 2007 to 2012, according to agricultural census data.
"I was really looking forward to going back there and picking more," said Ruth Billiter, who said she visited Magon's orchard once. "The next season comes around, and next thing I know they have a fence with barbed wire up on top."
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Magon maintains that he intended to sell only the land back in 2010, not the trees. And for more than a year after the sale, he continued to harvest the fruit.
Ended arrangement
"That was my retirement, my savings. Everything was in the revenue of the trees," he said.
But Magon was not able to remove his plantings as quickly as he expected and, according to court documents, Tex-Tube's affiliate in January 2012 ended the arrangement under which he accessed the property.
Magon claims in the lawsuit that Tex-Tube and its affiliate verbally agreed to purchase the remaining trees, but he never received payment for them.
"You can't sell us trees that we already own," said Michael Hawash, an attorney for Tex-Tube and its affiliate. He called Magon's request for payment "preposterous."
Hawash said that Tex-Tube had no use for the trees, as it plans to build a manufacturing plant on the former orchard. But "it came to a point where the relationship with him just became untenable," Hawash said, referring to Magon.
Last October, the company brought in bulldozers to raze the trees, which Hawash said had died in the 2011 drought. Magon disputed this, saying that only some of the trees had perished.
"Unfortunately this I feel has put me in a bind financially," Magon said of his dispute with Tex-Tube and its affiliate. "I have nowhere to go."
Only a few dozen trees were left lining the driveway and circling the ranch house on Magon's former farm, the rest having become a vast expanse of grassland.
As Magon drove through the surrounding area, he pointed to a row of his trees that had been planted at a shopping mall off of U.S. 290, later to oaks he'd sold to small private ranches.
Said Magon: "It's not easy to let go."