reading

Preface

Hecks’ Orchard

We park on a bend in a narrow lane and walk down a grassy, rutted track hemmed in by rambling hedgerows. Cows eye us drily from the next field. Beyond them, the land curves away gently into suggestions of hills that are vaguely apologetic, as only English hills can be. The rattle of a tractor echoes from their direction. There’s birdsong, the odd plane, the occasional rustle and soft whump of falling fruit. And, I swear, though it’s probably imagined, a steam train in the distance.

As we near the gate, three stout old ladies in walking boots and armed with staffs tramp past and smile at us. ‘The fruit is very good this year!’ exclaims their leader.

As a city dweller, I dig out my own walking boots only for music festivals. I feel virtuous now I’m wearing them for something a little closer to their intended purpose than watching gloomy guitar bands in the pouring summer rain. As if in approval of my new mission, the dew of autumn’s first chill has washed the boots clean of mud, and they’re refreshingly light on my feet. Instead of being sucked at greedily by midnight swamps, they’re swishing through jewelled grass that has been left to grow long to cushion the imminent fall. Instead of the snap and crackle of discarded beer cups being trodden into the mire, the sound from beneath my soles is the squeak of wet apple skins, followed occasionally by a juddering crunch as the fallen fruit is mulched into the turf.

The trees stretch before us in lines, a jumble of shape and colour. Until now, I’d never noticed how diverse apples can be. Some are no bigger than plums, others are the size of small grapefruit. The Victorians prized thin-skinned apples that seemed to melt in your mouth over the tougher, waxier skins we see here. Beneath that skin, the flesh of one may be dry and crumbly, while the next might be creamy and soft, or juicy and crisp. Some hang in bunches like grapes, while others – no more than two inches across – line spindly, delicate branches, fizzing out from the heart of the tree, like hair full of static electricity. And if I always thought of apples as simply green or red, I see now the whole spectrum of pink, blush, purple and rose. Some are as dark and rich as Bordeaux wine. Others are streaked – green with dark purple stripes like battle scars.

An orchard is not a field. It’s not a forest or a copse. It couldn’t occur naturally; it’s definitely cultivated. But an orchard like this doesn’t override the natural order: it enhances it, dresses it up. It demonstrates that man and nature together can – just occasionally – create something more beautiful and literally more fruitful than either could alone. The vivid brightness of the laden trees, studded with jewels, stirs some deep genetic memory and makes the heart leap. Here is bounty and excitement. Three months early, here is Christmas, replete with shining baubles.

The main track through the centre of the orchard is stained ferrous orange by crushed, oxidized apple flesh. Buzzing wasps, drunk on the fallen fruit, carve random paths through the air. The tree bark is woodpecker-scarred and encrusted with lichen. Where branches have been cut away to maximize exposure to the sun for those that remain, the boles left behind are home to vast, multicultural insect nations.

The landscape around the orchard almost demands myth-making from those who observe it. If the Arthurian legend didn’t exist, you’d make it up on the spot as soon as you saw the unnatural majesty of Glastonbury Tor, which – let’s be honest – is probably exactly what someone did. Reputedly the site of Avalon, also known as Avallach, the ‘Isle of Apples’, ruled by the faerie queen Morgan le Fay, this part of Somerset is the land of fairies and the dead. The name ‘Avalon’ derives from the Celtic prefix av or af, which means ‘apple’. The Celts credited apples with the power of healing and youth. Merlin sat beneath an apple tree to teach, and Avalon is where King Arthur was brought to be healed, to the home of the fabled golden apples of immortality.

My companion here in Hecks’ Orchard has been studying apples for the last ten years, and he’s brought me here to show me why. Bill Bradshaw is a professional photographer who found that when he started taking pictures of apples and orchards he couldn’t stop. Now he plucks one and takes a bite. ‘This is a Kingston Black,’ he says, holding it out to me. ‘It’s the king of cider apples. Perfectly balanced. It’s bitter and sharp and dry and sweet all in one. Have a bite – you’ll see what I mean.’

I do as I’m told. The first sensation in my mouth is one of perfect juice. As Bill says, it’s bitter and dry and sweet all at once, running over my teeth and gums, all goodness and refreshment.

The second sensation is a buzzing on my tongue. This buzz quickly becomes more jarring, until it feels like I’ve been licking a battery. My tongue is too large for my mouth. Did I say licking a battery? It now feels as though someone is pumping a low-voltage electrical current through my gums, and not in a nice way.

After a couple of minutes, my throat says, ‘Oh, you think your tongue is having problems?’ What starts as an itch at the top of my throat soon becomes a swelling, a constriction. I’m swallowing frequently now, and each time I try, it’s harder to do so. There’s a blockage that wasn’t there three minutes ago.

I can still breathe. I don’t think I’m going to require Bill to perform an emergency tracheotomy with the pen I was using to take notes until a few moments ago. Nevertheless, after admitting one bite of apple, it’s quite clear that my body has erected a hasty picket line to prevent entry of any further morsels.

I’ve experienced this reaction once or twice before, but I always imagined it was down to pesticides or other sprays, and it was never as bad as this – although now I think of it, it has become steadily more severe each time it has happened. Now, in the middle of a fully organic orchard, eating one tiny mouthful, I have to accept that I have developed a serious allergy to apples.

I ate apples perfectly happily while growing up. I never pushed a bag of crisps out of the way to get to one, but they were fine – juicy and satisfying, but quite monotone: the crowd-pleasing Golden Delicious that always made me wonder if toffee-apple-makers had got the relative proportions of toffee and apple the wrong way round; or the fat, watery culinary fruit that went into apple pies which, for me, were just an excuse to eat custard, because the school dinner ladies looked at you funny if you asked for a bowl of that on its own.

Now the apple has tricked me. After all these years of indifference, it has made me want it, desire it. A whole array of exotic riches, treasure growing on trees, promising a breadth of flavour sensations I could previously never have dreamed of. I gave in, and now I can never submit again: this new object of desire has been taken away from me even as it hangs in front of me.

For me, the apple really is the forbidden fruit.

1 How Apples Work

About ten years ago, my wife, Liz, and I were on holiday in the French Pyrenees. In late summer, we climbed winding roads through forests and past auberges selling ham baguettes and chestnut beer, and even though we knew we were heading to some kind of summit, every time we reached it and were presented with snow-capped mountains standing stark and impossibly solid against a clear blue sky, the clouds at their feet rather than at their peaks, the simple reality of them was almost impossible to process.

But in this part of the world, some of the most extraordinary sights are beneath the mountains. The Pyrenees are dotted with cave complexes in which the effects of Stone Age life have been remarkably preserved. When we think of the Palaeolithic ‘caveman’, our impressions are framed largely by what’s been found in sites like these.

Modern archaeological discoveries have questioned the notion that our ancestors ever really lived in caves, suggesting they were used only in winter months. While caves offer the perfect environment for the preservation of Stone Age artefacts, they give us only part of the story, which means we can easily get that story wrong.

There’s a big difference between the evolution of Homo sapiens and our progress towards our current state. That may sound obvious, but we often forget this when we think about our ancestors. The time-worn depiction of the caveman is of a primitive brute, hitting anything that moves with his club, attempting to seduce his cavewoman with a succession of grunts before giving up and dragging her by the hair back to his dank, smelly lair. But ten, twenty, thirty thousand years ago, human brains were just as big and developed as they are now. We had no library of centuries-old accumulated knowledge, but we surely had ideas, judgements, emotions, a sense of humour, a sense of spirituality, and theories about how the world around us worked.

When Liz and I visited la grotte de l’Ariège in the Pyrenees, such thoughts came alive around us. Archaeologists now believe places such as this had some special symbolic or religious role rather than simply being everyday living spaces. The deeper we went under the mountain into the heart of the complex, where the paintings are densest, the less likely it seemed that they were mere decoration for Stone Age living-room walls. The caves with the finest paintings would not have been as comfortable or practical as those we passed through to get to them. The locations of some of the most impressive paintings suggest the artist endured long hours in uncomfortable or even dangerous positions.

Two things struck me about the art itself: the sheer quality and talent of the artist in rendering animal shapes that seem to move with lithe grace across the undulating cave walls, and the presence of abstract shapes whose meanings are still unknown. Are they mere doodles, or some kind of code or language? Either way, when you stand and look at the paintings, especially the hand silhouettes created by spitting paint from the mouth on to splayed fingers, you feel the presence of other human beings long gone: not club-wielding cavemen, but people just like us, as if they existed only moments ago.

The paintings I looked at were 14,000 years old. After researching similar paintings in the Chauvet Cave in southern France that are thought to be around 40,000 years old, archaeologist Steven Mithen wrote that these ‘first representational paintings we have … are as technically accomplished and expressive as any painting by humankind – there was no gradual, cumulative evolution of the capacity for art’.

In his book The Alchemy of Culture, which explores the use of intoxicants in ancient societies, Richard Rudgley proposes that cave paintings of animals are more than simply a diary of what’s been eaten, or a how-to guide to hunting. A study of the animals depicted on cave walls in Lascaux, south-western France, shows that only one reindeer features on the walls, yet the large quantity of reindeer bones in the debris on the cave floor suggests it was a dietary staple. There’s a discrepancy between the animals painted and the animals that were hunted and eaten, leading researchers to conclude that the paintings had some symbolic significance that, so far, we can only guess at.

Five or six years after my visit to the caves, I was standing in an orchard in Somerset, my throat angry and swollen after my last ever bite of an apple. Behind my acute discomfort, I was feeling a rush of excitement from the tide of images and associations that had just flooded me. The apple as a symbol, a metaphor or badge, has always lurked at the edge of my subconscious, subliminally, as I’m sure it has for most people who live in the temperate climates where it thrives. I wasn’t recognizing some hitherto unnoticed close affinity with the fruit – far from it – but the sudden rush of impressions and emotions, the deep stirring I felt in my soul, was an awakening, a realization of just how ubiquitous the apple is, and how little thought I’d given it until now.

We’ve done the same thing to the apple as our ancestors did with the animals they chose to portray on their sacred walls. Sure, apples have always been important to our diets: archaeological evidence of wild apples being collected and eaten in Europe goes back 11,000 years, and apples have been cultivated since at least 2000 BC. But while apple cultivation has been widespread across Europe and Asia for millennia, important as it is, the apple is hardly the most crucial ingredient of our diet. It’s one fruit among many. And if our veneration had any relationship to real-world, practical importance, our myths and legends would surely be full of references to wheat instead. Hunter-gatherers first settled down to build permanent settlements so they could grow crops. Some form of grain – to bake bread or brew beer – is far more pervasive, and has remained more central to our diets throughout the history of civilization than the apple ever has.

Yet it’s the apple that has been granted a symbolic role unmatched by anything else, across cultures and continents. As well as Avalon, there are the golden apples of Greek myth, and silver and gold apples handed down through countless generations of fairy tales. Isaac Newton observed an apple falling to the ground* in a straight line in his mother’s garden in Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, inspiring him to formulate his theory of gravity. The first logo for Apple Computer, Inc. showed Newton sitting beneath a tree with the apple above him, about to fall. This was later changed to the rainbow-coloured apple with a bite taken from it, suggesting the acquisition of knowledge, and the Mac is named after McIntosh, a North American apple variety popular in school lunchboxes. There’s the bright green Granny Smith of the Beatles’ record label, which was named, according to Paul McCartney, because ‘We [were] starting a brand-new form of business. So, what is the first thing that a child is taught when he begins to grow up? A is for Apple.’ The story of William Tell shooting an apple from his son’s head with a crossbow is merely one version of a legend that keeps cropping up in Germanic folklore through the centuries. There are enough different stories about how New York came to be known as ‘The Big Apple’ to fill a book of their own. Then there’s the apple for teacher, the bad apple that spoils the bunch and the apple of my eye, who often upsets the apple cart. ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ may sound like another one of these many proverbs, but it was actually coined by J. T. Stinson, a Missouri fruit specialist, at the 1904 St Louis World Fair in response to a sharp decline in the cultivation of apples caused by the temperance movement. Until the late nineteenth century, America’s apples were mainly cultivated for cider rather than eating, which was then a novel concept. Stinson saw the way things were going, and he wasn’t just coming up with a sound bite – apples contain fibre, vitamins and flavonoids that play an important role in preventing many types of disease and promoting good digestion.

And then there’s the most famous apple in the Western world, different from all the others in that it didn’t give us the theory of gravity, or Sergeant Pepper or a more intuitive desktop interface, or any of the other revolutionary discoveries that have made our lives better: it gave us suffering, the experience of fruitless toil and agonizing labour, after precipitating our ejection from Paradise.

The size, shape, colour and texture of the apple all play their role in making it so symbolically and culturally important. But so does its ubiquity. We’ve domesticated the apple far more than we have most fruits. The apple tree is as much man’s best friend as the dog is. Liberty Hyde Bailey was an American horticulturalist and botanist who co-founded the American Society for Horticultural Science in 1903. He wrote sixty-five books on horticulture, including The Apple-Tree in 1922. Despite the incredible breadth of his knowledge and activities, nothing matched his fascination with the apple:

The apple-trees are of human habitations and human labor; they cluster about the buildings, or stand guard at a gate; they are in plantations made by hands. As I see them again, I wonder whether any other plant is so characteristically a home-tree. So is the apple-tree, even when full grown, within the reach of children. It can be climbed. Little swings are hung from the branches. Its shade is low and familiar. It bestows its fruit liberally to all alike.

This familiarity hides the apple tree in plain sight. Like air or water or beer, it’s so much a part of the everyday, we forget how special it is.

I was in Hecks’ Orchard with Bill Bradshaw that day because we were writing a book about cider together. Over the next two years, we explored orchards around the world, and when we finished that book I was left with a fascination for orchards and apples that went far beyond the drink they make. I wanted to explore the apple in all its guises, and I found that I missed orchards and had a yearning to be back in them. When Bill started photographing apples and orchards, he found he couldn’t stop. When I began exploring the breadth and depth of the apple and its various stories and roles, the same fate befell me.

Imagine slicing open an apple – or even better, put this book down and go fetch a couple of apples and a sharp knife. Slice one apple from top to bottom to reveal its centre. The shape of the seed cavity revealed in this way reminds some particularly imaginative commentators of female genitalia, which turns the apple into a symbol of sexual desire. Slice the other apple horizontally, and in the heart of the flesh you’ll see five seed chambers in the shape of a pentagram, one of the most widely used religious symbols in the world. Recently it’s become most strongly associated with the occult, witchcraft and devil worship, but it has a long history as a doorway to the secrets of both good and evil. In early Christianity, it represented the five senses, or Jesus’s five wounds on the Cross. Upside down, with two points facing up, it’s a symbol of evil, the goat of black magic. The ancient Greeks saw it as representing the five elements of fire, earth, metal, water and wood, and today it’s the primary symbol of Wicca in the same way that the Cross represents Christianity. That’s an awful lot of symbolism in return for two simple knife cuts.

Between those five seed chambers you’d probably be able to pick out around twenty seeds. If you planted each seed in a separate pot or bed, only a few would flourish. But as a thought experiment, let’s imagine you could give each seed the perfect composition of soil, light and water it needed to grow. This would be more difficult than you might think, because the perfect conditions would be different for each one. But if you succeeded in somehow nurturing every one of those trees to maturity, you’d have twenty quite different apple trees. If your individually tailored combinations of soil, light and water could make each tree happy enough to bear fruit, few of them would be pleasant to eat, and the chances of any of them being like the apple you sliced open would be minimal. Each one would be an entirely new variety of apple, with different preferences, needs and characteristics. Maybe, if you kept repeating the process for years, or even decades, you might find the next Golden Delicious or Kingston Black.

Like any living species, the apple’s primary motivation is to survive and pass on its genes to the next generation. To do so, it’s become a cunning seducer. Its beautiful blossom attracts bees and other pollinators to bring pollen from other trees to fertilize it. The most basic fruit or grain consists of a seed or embryo, and food to sustain it while it grows its own roots and shoots. Early apples were little more than this – tiny, bitter and probably toxic. But the apple learned some smart tricks over the years.

If the seed were to fall too close to the parent tree, parent and offspring would all be competing for the same nutrients and sunlight. Until recently, orchardists wanting to keep their trees in peak condition would plant them eight or nine feet apart. So in the wild, the apple learned to grow fruit that’s shiny and alluring, begging to be plucked. Recent studies in the neuroscience of the senses show that the redder something is, the sweeter we perceive its taste to be. Shades of green suggest citrus refreshment. Deep in its genetic coding, the apple knows this, and puts itself on display to passing creatures.

While some humans leave the core and seeds when eating an apple, most animals devour the entire fruit. The seed inside is smooth and tear-shaped, and passes through a mammalian digestive tract with minimum fuss. Hours later, yards or maybe even miles from the parent tree, the seeds find themselves deposited on the ground in a pile of fertile manure.

With its incredible genetic diversity, each apple seed then behaves like Goldilocks in the bears’ cottage. This ground is too wet. This ground is too dry. This is too rocky. This slope faces the wrong way. Right here is perfect. The forest ten miles north might suit seeds one, five and thirteen, but they’d never stand a chance on the grasslands to the south, which are perfect for seeds two, eight and nine. Five hundred miles east, or across the ocean to the west, seeds twelve and nineteen, doomed anywhere else on the planet, might just find that perfect hollow where the temperature is cool enough, the big hill provides the right shelter from the wind, and the slope stops just before the dip where a late frost would spell disaster.

Malus domestica, the domesticated apple, originated in the Tien Shan mountain range in Kazakhstan. Its origins were proposed by the brilliant but mostly forgotten Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov in 1929, and have been confirmed by DNA analysis in the last twenty years. Teams of American scientists have visited the apple forests of the Tien Shan mountains and encountered astonishing genetic diversity there. They have calculated that the apple as it has been bred and domesticated around the world contains as little as 20 per cent of the genetic material in the Kazakh forests, and that the apple’s wild ancestors may hold the key to its future in an age where breeding and genetic technology are becoming ever more sophisticated.

But the apple has used its combination of seductiveness and genetic diversity to spread from Kazakhstan, along the old spice roads to China one way and through Persia and into Europe in the other direction and, ultimately to every temperate climate (with particular help from humans when it comes to navigating oceans). Drive along a country road in western England, and during the summer you’ll probably see an apple tree in the hedgerow every mile or so. Each one is most likely the result of someone throwing a gnawed core from the window of a moving car. Each one is a new variety with a lottery player’s chance of becoming a global superstar. It’ll probably be sour or astringent, or particularly susceptible to pests, or poor of yield. But you never know. The first Granny Smith was discovered in a garden belonging to Maria Ann Smith in Eastwood, New South Wales (now a suburb of Sydney), in 1868. The first Bramley came from a seed planted by a young girl, Mary Ann Brailsford, in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, in 1809. The Yarlington Mill, one of Somerset’s finest cider apples, was found growing out of a crack in the wall of a watermill in Yarlington, North Cadbury, in Somerset. Whenever an apple variety has the word ‘seedling’ or ‘pippin’ in its name, it’s because it was discovered in a similar way.

Those familiar fruits are the result of thousands of years of crossbreeding, random at first, then guided by human hands. This long process has given us a fruit with astonishing genetic complexity and a wily resilience that helps explain our special attachment to it.

Once we’ve won the lottery and discovered an apple that tastes great, crops well and is resistant to pests, bugs and blight, it takes on a life of its own. The Bramley and the Golden Delicious are famous around the world. But surely this begs a nagging question: if I’m going to get an entirely different variety of apple by planting the seeds from my Granny Smith apple, how come we have so many Granny Smith apples? They can’t all come from the same tree.

This is where human intervention comes in. Like our human genes, the apple’s genes are complex. We may have some physical resemblance to our parents, but each one of us is our own person – unique. The only method for producing identical humans would be cloning. While we’ve managed to do this with sheep and dogs in the last few years, we’ve yet to do it with humans. But we’ve been doing it with apples for over 2,000 years.

To propagate a desired tree variety, you simply take a cutting from the tree you want to propagate and graft it on to rootstock – usually a young sapling selected for the characteristics of its root system and what these confer on the growth of the tree. The genetic instructions that determine the characteristics of the fruit come from the grafted wood rather than the rootstock. If the graft takes, you have a clone of your superstar tree. Graft a hundred cuttings from a Granny Smith tree on to a hundred different rootstocks, and you’ll have a hundred Granny Smith trees. Every single Granny Smith tree in the world is a cutting from a cutting from a cutting of who knows how many generations, all of which trace a direct line back to that garden that now sits in a Sydney suburb. And if that sounds like a triumph of modern scientific ingenuity, what makes it even more incredible is that the technique was well established by the time of Alexander the Great.

Knowledge of grafting techniques spread unevenly throughout history, and was lost and found at various times. So imagine a time and a place where the principles of grafting and propagation were unknown. Imagine all you could do was plant apples from seed and hope that this one was a good one. Most of the trees you planted would produce sour fruit, or fruit that became corrupted on the branch. Imagine you found one tree that bore shining, healthy fruit, year after year, and that fruit was sweet, satisfying and nutritious. We now know that this tree is the product of genetic diversity and random mutations, just like us. But imagine what it must have been like not to know that. Imagine planting the seeds from your perfect tree and getting new trees that bore no resemblance to it while the first tree carried on, year after year, bearing perfect fruit. Is it any surprise the sacred apple tree is such a common theme in fairy tale and myth?

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were German academics, linguists and cultural researchers who specialized in collecting and sifting through folk tales that had been handed down orally for generations across Europe. In Central and Eastern Europe, the brothers found plenty of stories revolving around golden apples. These would invariably grow on a tree in a royal palace and be revered by the king. There’s a common meme, interpreted in seemingly endless different permutations, in which the apples are stolen and a long quest begins to get them back, usually involving the hero being eaten and regurgitated by wolves, pecked by eagles or otherwise being killed, and sometimes reincarnated, in a variety of creatively grisly ways. Many of these tales are convoluted and difficult to follow, and it’s not surprising that they’ve been forgotten.* But the image of the revered tree, alone in a private courtyard or centre stage in an enchanted garden, is so common that it must surely be another example of the seedling that randomly – almost magically – turned out to be so much more special than all the others.

Perhaps the most famous Grimm story is that of Snow White, where an apple forms the linchpin in the conflict between the innocent beauty of Snow White and the jealousy of the evil stepmother, the Queen, the symbol of temptation and desire:

QUEEN: And since you’ve been so good to poor old Granny, I’ll share a secret with you. This is no ordinary apple. It’s a magic wishing apple.

SNOW WHITE: A wishing apple?

QUEEN: Yes. One bite, and all your dreams will come true. Now make a wish, and take a bite.

At first Snow White is hesitant, but when the Queen pushes her, slyly, she admits there is someone she loves, and wishes that ‘he will carry me away to his castle where we will live happily ever after’. Having admitted love and desire, she bites the apple and falls into a deathly sleep.

As you might expect, the original story is darker and more bloodthirsty than the Hollywood adaptation. In the version set down by the Grimm Brothers, the huntsman charged with taking Snow White into the woods and killing her finds he cannot do so, and brings back the lungs and liver of a young boar to convince the Queen the girl is dead. Believing the entrails to belong to the young girl, the Queen eats them. When she discovers Snow White is still alive, she tries not once, but three times, to kill her: first with a silky, laced bodice that she ties too tightly, then with a poisoned comb, and finally with the poisoned apple. After the first two attempts, the dwarves manage to revive Snow White. On the third occasion, the magical apple is half white, half red. The Queen, disguised as a farmer’s wife, cuts the apple in two and eats the safe, white half herself. Snow White takes one bite of the poisoned half and immediately falls into what is, effectively, a coma. This time, the dwarves – unable to find the cause of her ailment – cannot revive her, and place her in a glass coffin.

Possibly the most unintentionally disturbing part of the original story is when a passing prince who, in this version, has never met Snow White before, spies the seemingly dead woman in the glass coffin, takes a fancy to her and asks the dwarves if he can take her with him. The dwarves don’t think there’s anything weird about this and agree. The prince has his servants lift up the coffin, but as they carry it away they stumble on some tree roots. The jolt forces a partially digested piece of apple to become dislodged from Snow White’s throat, and she wakes up. Instantly, the young couple decide they will marry. In the Disney version, the spell can be broken only by true love’s kiss. A handsome prince who previously saw Snow White and heard her sing has fallen in love with her. His kiss revives her, and everyone lives happily ever after.*

Why has this one fairy tale become world famous while so many of the other Grimm fairy tales have been all but forgotten? I’ll concede that the dwarves have something to do with it. But might it also be that the apple, the embodiment of temptation and desire, appeals to us? Because it’s not just in Middle European fairy tales that such a symbolic relationship crops up. It’s consistent across pretty much any mythology or religion in the world’s temperate regions. I wanted to know why. But as well as delving into ancient myth, I wanted to learn more about the real world of apple cultivation, too. From the first day I did so, I found that mythology and horticulture enjoy a much closer relationship than I could have imagined.

Pete Brown

THE APPLE ORCHARD

The Story of Our Most English Fruit

PARTICULAR BOOKS

Contents

Preface

Hecks’ Orchard

Part One

BLOSSOMING

April–May

1

How Apples Work