The Giant Pistachio

A pistachio 30 feet tall stands beside US Highways 54 and 70 north of Alamogordo, New Mexico, its buff shell split to show a purple and green seed. Tim McGinn commissioned it after his father died in 2007, and it was finished the following year. He gave a local craftsman, Ernest Martinez, a single fresh pistachio and asked him to build one the size of a windmill. Martinez took about four months over it, welding a framework of iron pipes onto a buried concrete base, stretching wire netting across it for a shell, then rendering the whole thing in cement and painting it. A bronze plaque at the foot dedicates it to Thomas Michael McGinn, who founded the family's pistachio ranch, and ends by saying he dreamed big, expected big and accomplished big things, and would have said the monument was not big enough. Tom McGinn put in his first seventeen acres in 1980, on high desert between the Sacramento Mountains and the white gypsum dunes, and kept planting until the property was full. Pistachios suit the ground here: they want hot dry summers, cold winters and deep alkaline soil, all of which the Tularosa Basin has, and the trees take the better part of a decade to bear. The ranch now runs to about 12,500 trees on some 90 acres, with 14 acres of wine grapes alongside them. The family holds a registered trademark on the phrase World's Largest Pistachio, which makes it a brand rather than a record; the only body ever to have proclaimed it one is a certification company that sells the service.