Offices with balconies are unusual enough in Manhattan. But offices with balconies containing fruit-bearing trees are truly rare. They do, however, exist.

For the last 15 years, the publicity director of New Directions Publishing Corporation, Laurie Callahan, has nurtured a cherry tree on the balcony outside her office. It sits near a fig tree and young peach tree on a narrow patio overlooking 14th Street. Yesterday, she plucked the ripe cherries and took them home to bake her annual office treat: a sumptuous cherry pie.

“No cinnamon or cloves,” Ms. Callahan said of the recipe that will go on to feed the staff at a tea-time gathering.

The pie is less Jack Horner than Jack Kerouac. Founded by a Harvard-educated Pittsburgh steel heir, James Laughlin – who helped introduce literary modernism in this country – New Directions publishes 30 books a year. Its list, which is not known for cookbooks, contains definitive editions of Dylan Thomas, Denise Levertov, H.D., and others.

This year the publishing house celebrates its 70th year. Recent catalogs feature playwright Tennessee Williams’s memoirs with an introduction by filmmaker John Waters, and Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” with an introduction by T.S. Eliot and a new preface by Jeanette Winterson. Their far-flung international list features new voices from Russian Buddhists to Albanian poets.

But back to that cherry pie: Ms. Callahan makes a crust from a recipe found in Gourmet magazine, and the filling from a recipe in the Fanny Farmer cookbook. (One quart of cherries, 1 /8 teaspoon of salt, 1 cup of sugar, 1 tablespoon of flour and baked at 425 degrees for about 45 minutes.)

The cherry tree came to the office 15 years ago when Ms. Callahan ordered it – via mail order – from Wayside Gardens in North Carolina. Other plants on the New Directions patio are used in sharable food, as well: the leaves of a rosemary bush go into a sugar syrup that Ms. Callahan serves on cornmeal cake with blackberries and whipped cream, and the leaves of a bay tree are used in soups or stews.

Though Laughlin, the founding editor, was not a gardener, he certainly liked the outdoors: An avid skier, he had gone butterfly hunting with Vladimir Nabokov and played tennis with Ezra Pound. And the consumption of the pie takes place with ceremonial solemnity and a spirit of literary achievement.

The staff assembles in a room near a hallway that contains a drawing of Cocteau, a medical prescription by William Carlos Williams, Mexican day-of-the-dead decorations given by Greek born Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, and a watercolor by Henry Miller. Before serving the pie to the New Directions staff in the office of the president and publisher, Peggy Fox, Ms. Callahan begins a well-known Japanese song about “sakura,” which is an ornamental cherry tree.

Thus far, she’s had no complaints about the office pastry. “Everyone tells me they like it,” she said, adding that they also tell her if she missed a pit or two. When the tree was young, she made cherry compote on ice cream.

The Knickerbocker first learned about the cherry tree from an assistant editor at New Directions, Kurt Beals, who is also a vocalist and bass guitarist in a band called Pterodactyl. Mr. Beals will begin graduate work in German studies at Berkeley this fall.

Ms. Callahan, whose mother was a landscape architect, edited Argentine novelist Cesar Aira’s “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter,” a fictional account of a 19th-century German artist who visited Latin America. The next book by Mr. Aira that New Directions is publishing is “How I Became a Nun” about a girl or boy who winds up in a vat of strawberry ice cream.

Those who cannot enjoy the pie at New Directions can read A.E. Housman’s poem “A Shropshire Lad.”

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.