The apple tree is the first in the tree world, and it exists at the beginning of everything. Whether it is the "forbidden fruit" in the Garden of Eden or the "golden apple" in ancient Greece, if we want to explore the source of culture, apples can’t be bypassed.
Nowadays, the "Apple", which lacks a bite, has strongly intervened and changed our lives in another way.
So why apples?
This article is selected from Chapter 17, Apple Tree, of Trees that Live for a Long Time.
01
Those famous apples and apple trees
In Song of Solomon, the apple tree is the most desirable tree in the forest, the lover’s love nest and pantry, and every breath of lovers carries the fragrance of apples. In the eyes of the Greeks, it is a tree of love and discord, because when faced with three goddesses who all thought the golden apple should belong to them, Paris made a difficult choice. He thought it belonged to Avelot Dite, the god of love. The rejected goddess Hera and Athena launched revenge and quickly escalated into an all-consuming conflict, which enabled Paris to win Helen of Troy in the disastrous Trojan War, but lost everything else.
Apple trees nourish both love and hatred, as you can see from the way the fruit grows. An apple that grows on a tree usually has a chubby cheek bathed in the late summer sun, and the other cheek is against a rough branch, pale and green. The sun plays a role in ripening and adding happiness to the branches of apples.
Apple is not only a close friend of the sun, but also the fruit of Poisonous Tree, which can grow rapidly in a heart full of repressed anger and jealousy. There is something about this kind of tree that produces perfect spherical fruit, which is suitable for the palm of your hand to grasp. We know this from the story of Snow White when we were very young. Under the shiny and lovely red skin, we sometimes find bug eyes, salamanders and completely rotten fruit stones. Not every bite is as sweet as it promises.
A falling apple seems to represent the end of vibrant beauty, which is a happy moment and a moment when everything has lost its future. In fact, however, a falling apple often means the beginning.
In 1665, isaac newton abandoned his research at Cambridge University because of the plague outbreak and returned to his family farm in Lincolnshire. In this season, a large number of apples in the orchard is a common sight, but in this year, he looked at it with a brand-new eye. Why did the apple fall to the ground? Why not fly into the sky or fly around sideways in the orchard? For this clever young mathematician, a quiet hour under that apple tree brought enlightenment and change. It was a tree of wisdom, a lucky fall, because the movement mode of the whole solar system was suddenly exposed in this fruit that was blown down by the wind.
Newton’s apple tree grew to a very old age and finally succumbed to gravity and collapsed in 1820, but the orchard survived and became a monument to the tenacious vitality of this apple tree. A branch of the fallen old tree has now grown into a stout old tree, which still bears many red apples every autumn. This ancient variety is called "Flower of Kent", and the fruit will change from green to orange and then to red during the ripening process.
Apple tree in front of Newton’s dormitory
The original tree left a small piece of wood, and now it is made into a snuff bottle and displayed in the manor house, just like some kind of sacred relic. There is a huge clock in the nearby isaac newton Shopping Center in Grantham. Every time the clock strikes the hour, a red plastic apple will ring the clock, scaring a sleeping lion and unsuspecting tourists. During the comprehensive reconstruction of this shopping center, the viability of this tree was severely tested, but the lion, the apple and the clock are still there. )
When the rainbow trademark composed of an apple and a leaf became the famous logo of the first batch of personal computers, which linked the era of gigabytes with the great Newton scientific revolution, Apple’s position as a tree of knowledge was further consolidated.
This symbol was also interpreted as a tribute to alan turing, who was an expert in code decoding, a computer pioneer and a homosexual. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain at that time, and his suicide in 1954 was related to the excessive pressure caused by it. When he was found, his body was lying next to a poisonous apple, which was bitten, just like the apple that Snow White had bitten.
Stills from the movie The Imitation Game.
This trademark may also be related to the youth revolution in the 1960s, because when Steve Jobs was 13 years old, his favorite band set up their Apple Record Company.
The Beatles presented their "Apple Company" to the business community, making this apple a symbol of youth culture. The hosts of pop music programs liked the first record released by this company with an Australian green apple as its trademark, because Hey, Zude was the longest single at that time, and the playing time of more than seven minutes allowed them to seize the time to have a cup of coffee before the end of "NaNaNaNaNaNaNaNaNaNaNaNaNa". The song on the B side of this record is Revolution. The Beatles’ fans made fresh preparations and flocked to the Apple store in Baker Street, only to find that they could not afford most of the things sold there, thus exposing the defects of this business model.
In the mythical kingdom of eternal youth, everyone eats apples, at least the ancient Celts thought so. This kind of fruit grows very luxuriantly in the mysterious Avalon Island. According to Tennyson’s imagination, there are "deep meadows, happiness and beauty, orchards and lawns everywhere". King Arthur, who was seriously injured and dying, was sent to this paradise island for healing.
Stills of TV series "The Legend of Merlin"
In the eyes of the Vikings, the powerful male elite gods also relied on Eden’s lovely apples to stop aging and death. The apple tree’s long-term connection with youth may be related to its relatively short life. Unlike oak or yew, apple trees often don’t live for 30 years. Before their slow-growing British compatriots really start to exert their strength, they grow rapidly and then fall down. They age at an alarming rate and become susceptible to unfortunate diseases, such as apple rot and scab. Even a healthy tree has rough brown bark, and its branches stretch at strange angles, as if it had hunched before it was old.
All the advantages of this tree seem to converge on the flawless red rose fruit. Some apple trees do live to be 80 years old, 100 years old or longer, but once these old and decaying trees stop bearing fruit and start to drop branches, there are not many days left.
02
The variety name of apple, alsofull ofstory
In the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 2002, only two old apple trees were included in the list of 50 "Great Britain Trees" by the Forestry Commission. One was Newton’s apple tree with great historical significance, and the other was the first "Green Treasure" apple tree in Southwell, Nottinghamshire.
Although Mary Ann Brailsford first cultivated this kind of apple tree with a seed during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain’s favorite cooking apple was named after the butcher Mr. Bramley, who bought Mary’s cottage garden in the year when Queen Victoria ascended the throne and saw the first batch of green apples swell on the branches. The real potential of this apple was soon discovered by the meriwether family, who owned a local nursery, quickly collected cuttings from Mr. Butcher’s tree and built an orchard.
The success of these apples is commensurate with their size, and their names are now well known, which also proves that an apple tree can become eternal in many different ways. The reputation of the "Green Treasure" apple could not protect the future of the tree, and it fell to the ground a few years later. However, the new roots and branches from the old trunk and a more enthusiastic owner made it enjoy fame and fortune again.
Since apple trees flourish and fall so fast, we might think that they reproduce quickly. In fact, few apple trees grow from seeds, because apple trees are heterozygotes, and their seedlings are generally very different from their parents.
Although Mary Ann Brailsford has achieved great success, it is unlikely that a tree cultivated with seeds will grow into a healthy and fruitful adult tree, which I discovered from a gardening experiment I did in my childhood. After planting some apple cores with great enthusiasm, I watched them grow into beautiful saplings first, and then gradually become stunted and distorted, which is not so much a tree as a poor imitation of it. There is indeed a tree that lived to adulthood, but it is by no means the tall, upright and fruitful tree I hope to see.
More experienced growers know that the best way to breed apple trees is to cut scions from healthy trees, that is, small branches, and then graft them on rootstocks. Through the hybridization of different varieties, new varieties of apples are constantly cultivated. The great apple tree belonging to Paul barnett made the news in 2013, because there are 250 different kinds of apples growing on it, all grafted on its hospitable branches. This amazingly lush crown is covered with bright fruits and the Yangtze River Delta-shaped Caiqi Yang with the name of each variety, which is so heavy that the trunk can hardly bear it, so each branch is supported by a stick. As a result, a strange, angular shadow appeared under this lush apple tree.
Apple trees are by no means an eternal part of British culture. On the contrary, apple trees have been changing in one way or another. Shakespeare once enjoyed an ancient ribbed apple named "Costard Apple", but when Richard Cox completely abandoned his wine-making business in 1820 and began to concentrate on cultivating apples in a manor near Slough, this Costard apple was basically extinct.
Like the fate of most famous apple trees, Cox’s first "orange peel flat" apple tree was blown down in 1911, but at the same time, the demand for these delicious dessert apples has been so great that it has many flourishing offspring. The display of different apple varieties is likely to be like a family gathering. "Stemme Pippin" is probably the hybrid offspring of "Libston Pippin" apple and a peerless apple.
Apple cultivation, regardless of rank, thrives in cottage gardens and big estates. Although the name of "Brenim Orange" is noble, it was actually first cultivated by a worker in Oxfordshire. Besides the orchard, where else can you see the grenadiers, Duke of Devonshire, Lord lambourn, Lord Burleigh, Prince of Wales, Anne Elizabeth, Reverend William Crump, and Australian Green Apple (literally "Granny Smith") together? (But the "Australian green apple" in the British orchard may taste sour, because it needs the sunshine from Australia to sweeten it. )
In addition to these wise and meticulous cultivation, lucky discoveries have always existed. For example, Beth Poole was named after the daughter of an innkeeper, and one day she found this sapling in the forest. Apple’s history is full of hard struggle and accidents, but there are also many stories about someone finding potential in an unremarkable young apple tree. Apple’s variety name is also full of stories behind it, but be careful, "Adams Pearman" has nothing to do with the world’s first gardener, it is named after Mr. Robert Adams. Moreover, if you think that the "Newton miracle" has something to do with Sir Isaac, it is all wet. It was first cultivated by Newton, the king of Derbyshire.
So there is nothing particularly "natural" about apple trees. Even their mature contours are often artificial. People like pruning apple trees, as if they can learn a trick or two with a little patience. But you’re right. After pruning by skilled hands, these apple trees can take on the most surprising shapes, such as pyramids, wine glasses, V-shaped armbands or peacock tails. The branches of the wall-type apple tree extend outward from the middle like a huge green seesaw. The name of this pruning method comes from the word "shoulder", because these oversized branches need support most when they reach the height of the shoulder. Pruning is not only for the pursuit of novel shapes, but also makes picking easier, ensuring that fruits grow more evenly and are fully irradiated by sunlight to achieve full coloring.
03
Apples also mean health and life support.
Apples have always been a basic and affordable food, whether they are eaten raw directly from trees or baked in pies, puffs, amber apple pies or pasta. In Britain, people who couldn’t afford a stove used to take apple dishes to the local bakery for cooking. These dishes need to be marked so as not to make someone angry because they took them wrong. Even bitter-tasting wild apples are seasonal gifts. They come from beautiful native wild apple trees and can be made into jam with sandwiches or meat dishes.
When I was a child, I always smelled jam when I came home from school at the end of September. My mother was busy cooking wild apples and slowly squeezed the thick dark pink jelly out of the homemade jam filter bag. The predecessor of this filter bag is an old pillowcase, which is tightly tied to the leg of an upturned curved wooden dining chair and hung in mid-air. Apples are rich in pectin, which is the favorite source of gel for vegetarians, so wild apple pulp can easily solidify into translucent sunset color in jars. Apple pectin can also help prunes, blackberries and green tomatoes to form jams and chutneys.
Apple pie
The ancient method of ripening tomatoes is to put an apple in a bag of tomatoes, which should be very effective, because apples naturally release a plant hormone-ethylene. However, some apple varieties have the opposite effect on human beings. Stem cells from a rare Swiss apple variety have been used to stimulate the growth of human skin and reduce wrinkles. Researchers are still exploring the effects of apples on preventing certain cancers and vascular diseases, as well as anti-aging.
An apple a day may become a prescription drug in the 21st century. With a smooth face and a body without pain, this dream is a modern version of the eternal country of youth, and the apple is still hanging there, inspiring us a new way to enter heaven. When those people throw the peeled apple peels behind their shoulders to learn the initials of their future spouses, who would have thought that these apple peels would later be found to contain triterpenes, an anticancer chemical?
Healthy, life-sustaining apples may look British, but this tree bearing edible fruit came to England with the Romans, who planted sweet orchards wherever they went. Apple is also the basis of American identity, not just for new york.
The legendary "Johnny Apple Seed" planted his nursery all over the eastern states, and constructed the myth of a strong, healthy and hard-working typical American farmer. For a family full of maternal love and apple pie, this is the image of an ideal father. However, by tracing the genome of apples, we now know that the ancestors of all domesticated apples in the world are Xinjiang wild apples, a native species in Kazakhstan. Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, means "the city of apples", and the ancient wild orchards growing on the surrounding hillsides may soon be officially recognized as world heritage sites.
Apple seed Johnny
Today, thousands of varieties are marked on the world apple map, and this map also records the changes of consumer trends. As people’s tastes change, commercial fruit crops will also change. Nowadays, the most popular apple in Britain is "Gala" from New Zealand, which tastes very sweet. Exciting fruit-flavored sparkling wine has been popular recently, which has promoted a large-scale tree planting plan. We may think of more traditional cider brewers, pushing their beautiful juicers from orchard to orchard to squeeze out the last juice in summer. In the barn where the smell of sweat and ripe apples is strong, apple pickers are paid cider, which is not helpful for them to speed up their work.
In contrast, modern fruit cultivation has become a highly commercialized and highly efficient mechanized industry. In 2012, international competition led to the introduction of new laws to protect special regional products in the European Union. As a designated product, Herefordshire cider can only be brewed with locally produced bitter apple juice, such as Brown Nose, Norman in Bulmer, Chisel Jersey or Kingston Black. These varieties are unlikely to be confused with French wine apples, but "Norman in Bulmer" reminds us that English apples and French apples share the same blood.
Changes in tastes and commercial pressures mean that many old varieties with interesting names have almost disappeared in Britain, but now people are trying to preserve traditional orchards. London is unlikely to be the birthplace of Apple’s initiative, but in October 1999, the city held its first "Apple Day". In an exciting few hours, the British charity Common Position reused Covent Garden, which is dedicated to restoring the connection between commodities and nature and emphasizing regional specificity.
"Apple Day" aims to raise people’s awareness of caring for orchards by holding such a folk festival that reminds people of old England and is about to be forgotten. This is a festival for fruit growers, and it is held for those who love the prospect of rural life, and those who eat healthy food and are eager to be closer to nature.
"Apple Day" is St George’s Day in the new era. People from all political factions and social classes get together every year to enjoy apple pie and cider. Rich apple varieties have become a perfect symbol of regional characteristics and sharing spirit, so this festival is now blooming all over the country, but the specific date varies slightly due to different local varieties and picking time: in the middle of Wales, it is in mid-September, and in the Scottish border, it is in early October. Even the chopped apple tree sawdust is added to the festival to cook the barbecue with apple flavor.
Those who are not so interested in all vegetarian stalls and the "apple souffle" that emphasizes natural health and sprinkled with apple seeds will fall in love with bacon smoked with apple wood. Such bold traditional innovation may attract questioning eyes, but it will also make people admire apple growers’ keen market vision and their determination to remind modern consumers where their daily diet comes from.
04
The fruit of midsummer indicates that the days will get better.
In children’s eyes, apple has been inseparable from the computer industry, but with the help of this electronic product with the same name as the fruit tree, they can see the apple pickers in Kashmir or Chile, and then think about how much labor has been invested in the six clean and beautiful apples on the supermarket shelves. An apple has established direct contact with people in different parts of the earth. Before the end of apartheid in South Africa, the "Australian Green Apple" from this country was not popular in many parts of Europe.
However, an eternal question is, for those who work in orchards, is boycotting fruits helping them or harming their interests? You can still learn a lot from apples that are not electronic products. Staying under an apple tree for an hour not only sows the seeds of farmers and gardeners, but also cultivates future botanists, chemists, physicists, artists, economists, political scientists or business giants.
Apple logo
When you see growing apples in a real orchard, it is not difficult to understand this kind of fruit in the refrigerator. You can tell when an apple can be picked with a slight twist. If it is ripe, the fruit stalk will automatically loosen, so that the apple can be detached from the tree and held firmly in your palm; If you don’t pick them at the right time, the apples will pour down like cricket and bruise when they land. They often hide in the long grass and wait quietly until someone feels a brown sticky thing crushed under their feet.
These trees provide a way to explore nature and talk to all our senses. We can touch the rough bark, smell the ripe fruit, and listen to the buzzing of bees or the drumming of woodpeckers on dead branches. The ancient orchard is a paradise for some of the rarest and most beautiful species. Although the giant crowned salamander or scarab may be hidden out of sight, a small brown woodfinch may be crawling up and down the trunk slowly. On a moonlit night in September, you can even see a badger with a light-colored back eating fallen fruit, or a fox sticking out its long and elegant mouth to bite the fruit on the lower branch.
Of course, the charm of apple trees does not only appear in autumn. In Van Gogh’s eyes, the most important thing is apple blossom, and the most ugly deformed branches suddenly become beautiful, which means creativity. The petals, which are light in color and as light as down, suddenly open and breathtaking in beauty, which can cover the roughest and gnarled old trees with brilliant clouds. Earlier, when the dawn began to fall, you seemed to see these trees yawning, stretching their bodies and shaking their twigs. The buds on the tree seemed a little uncertain at first, but they gradually lit up every branch regardless of the lingering threat of frost, just like a sleepy smile blooming into a bright but firm smile. This seasonal commotion is presented in C. Under the bright green sky, butterfly-like flowers seem to be dancing with twisted branchlets.
Still Life and Apple, Van Gogh
CamillePissarro described the apple trees in picardie again and again, and he was deeply awed by the splendid dressing in spring, the lush in summer and the naked silhouette in winter. As white as a cotton shirt in spring, it has the same atmosphere as warm and mottled apricot yellow and dark yellow in autumn. Pissarro’s apple-centered world is a busy pastoral, with the emphasis on crooked branches and heavy wheelbarrows. But in the fields around the French island region, these very unique fruit trees are the real regional characteristics.
When the British war painter Paul Nash arrived in northern France in 1917, the scenery was completely different. He wrote a letter to his wife in the trench, describing a French village after being destroyed by war. "In the bright trees and the remaining orchards, there are piles of bricks, overturned roofs and only half of the houses left." Nash described the damaged orchard. In the amazing picture, the crown of the tree was blown off, the outline of the trunk was like broken glass, and the apple tree became a dark and twisted image, reaching out helplessly to the sun. These emotional paintings by him most powerfully show the absolute fear caused by World War I, and depend on people’s common understanding of the true meaning of apple trees.
This is a tree that should grow quietly in France, Britain and Germany, so that the new generation of young people in these places can pick, eat or drink their fruits, just like their fathers and grandfathers. The apple tree is a tree of life, but it is also a tree of knowledge, which makes people distinguish between good and evil and bears fruits that human beings can’t resist and possess regardless of the consequences. The destroyed orchard shows what the survivors of shell-shocked patients can’t say. What new beginning can there be in this ugly and barren ruin?
Nevertheless, there is still a deep and eternal desire to regain heaven and start over. Dylan Thomas was born just after the war broke out in 1914, but when he looked back on his childhood, he remembered that he had spent an idyllic childhood under the apple tree, and his heart was full of happiness. Here, the apple tree is not blamed, it shines in the eternal glory of lost youth. When the poet wrote this poem in 1945 and looked back on his early years as the "Prince of Appletown" with nostalgia, he had clearly realized the chain of time.
Rosie and Cider, written by Lori Li, translated by Zhu Lanlan/Zhouyi, Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House.
Rosie and Cider is a memoir of Laurie Lee’s childhood in the Cotswolds in the 1920s. The title comes from his first experience of tasting cider: "Those valleys, the golden juice of that time, the taste of this wine comes from wild orchards, from reddish-brown summer, from full red apples, and Rosie’s hot cheeks." This is a vivid personal record, not only of childhood, but also of intoxicating apples growing in heaven. People born after the war still show the same impulse to the Garden of Eden and regain their youth and innocence. No matter how much chance they have, no matter how much they pay, no matter what ruins are around them, they must start again.
In 1939, the war shook Europe again, but in the sound of gunfire and air raid alarms, people continued to quietly plant fruit trees and harvest fruits. Adrian Bell’s An Acre of Apples recorded a small farm in Suffolk during the Blitzkrieg, which also proved that apples are full of resistance and remain young forever. With the implementation of wartime rationing system, home-grown fruits have become vital to survival, and apples that can sustain life also have special value. When the British are trapped in the ice and snow and wandering on the unknown border of hell, the apples taken out of the storage box will be redder and brighter than when they were first loaded. These shiny fruits remind people of the summer time and also indicate that the days will be better. The apple tree means starting point, childhood and Eden, but it also means enlightenment, experience and future. If apple trees are often blamed for human misfortunes, they still have the extraordinary ability to continue to grow and let us start over.
This article is excerpted from
Trees that have lived for a long time
Author: [English] Fiona Stafford
Translator: Wang Chen/Wang Weiting
Producer: Unread Exploration Plus
Press: Beijing United Publishing Company
Publication year: May, 2019
Edit | Aries
Editor | Wei Bingxin
