The apple is everywhere. Karen Syberg travels around the world on her stimulating pomological expedition through apple orchards, art, technology, botany, mythology and popular culture.

By Heidi Laura. Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy.

“Hop yard and apple orchard…”  With the set words a fatherland song by Hans Christian Andersen encapsulates the Danish landscape in an idyllic image of beer and apple production.
 
That image is deeply imprinted in the minds of many, but Karen Syberg’s big book on apples in both nature and culture expands it immeasurably. Clearly the apple has a long history behind it in the north, but that history is only a chapter of the whole global tale. Since the first sour apples burst forth in Kazakhstan thousands of years ago, the apple has traveled west, crossed the world’s oceans and captured new continents, finally coming round to the east again: Today China is the largest producer of apples in the world. And throughout its world tour, the apple has lodged itself deep in local cultures and has implanted art, religion, mythology and poetry with its tempting and even dangerous sweetness. “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood , so is my beloved among the sons, I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” is how it is sung in 'The Song of Songs', a Hebrew poem that is several thousand years old..
 
Karen Syberg’s book taps the cider of the many apples which have appeared in centuries of culture. Just think of the infinite swarm of presentations of Adam and Eve and the apple in pictorial art, from the lingering look at the apple and its ominous power that is expressed in religious art to the use of the apple motif in new garb, as it appears in modern art – not to mention the advertising industry’s diligent recycling of these presentations. It is thought-provoking to consider that the Book of Genesis s does not even mention an apple, only a “fruit,” which in various religious traditions has been interpreted as a date, grapes, or even – somewhat naughtily – a banana! That the apple has finally acquired the status of the fruit that changed the history of the world with its irresistibility to Eve says much about its leading role in the kingdom of fruit. Today, one of the most highly visible apples sits on Mac computers and iPods as a symbol of rebellion against authority – in a direct continuation of the legend of the Fall.

It is this great, teeming history, reaching all the way from Eve to the Mac, that the journalist Karen Syberg incorporates in her understandably voluminous work, whose illustrations show the apple in its continuous cultural transformation over the course of time. More than anything else, the sweet apple is identified with fertility; therefore, the apple also has its goddesses. It is especially connected with the mother goddesses of ancient cultures who attend to fertility, The Roman goddess of fruit cultivation, Pomona, has given her name to pomology: the scientific development of the apple and its growth. It is no wonder that the apple belongs to women – in a halved apple, the seed capsules bear an intriguing resemblance to the intimate female anatomy. And if you halve an apple diametrically, its interior often resembles a pentagram: the five-pointed star which for thousands of years has been attributed with magical protective powers. The apple is also magical. Every culture in the world has seen omens in its appearance, used it in magic potions to evoke love in others, or as a medicine. In the pre-Christian English culture, sacrifices were made to an apple tree at the solstice: toasted bread soaked in cider was hung on the tree’s branches. The practice survived up until the mid-19th century in the English apple districts, and that is why even today in the English language one drinks a “toast”.

But the history of the apple is also fascinating from a botanical and technological point of view. A large stretch of time separates the ancient wild apple of the Caucasus from the contemporary varieties of apples, both sweet and sour.. The first sour wood apples are thought to have appeared in the Caucasus region when the glaciers drew back after the last ice age some 15 to 20,000 years ago. Gradually, an apple belt spread from the Tien Shan Mountains in the east to the Black Sea in the west. The ancient silk trade route passes through that area, and the apple traveled that way west and reached Europe. Bears played an unwitting role in the apple tree’s refinement because while they ate the sour apples whole, they chewed the sweet ones – the sweet apples made their droppings richer in seeds and these were thus planted more profusely. In the course of time, human consumption of the impressionable apple, however, removed most of its old Caucasian heritage and with it, unfortunately, at the same time, a good deal of the old variety’s resistance to disease and insect pests – modern apples also have less taste and fewer of the distinctive characteristics of the original variety.

The apple is important as a measure of civilization because the fruit requires skilled and persistent care. When there is not a sufficient surplus for that care, the sweet, cultivated apple begins to resort to its sour, tuberous wild form. That occurred, for example, in northern Europe in the first centuries A.D. during the lengthy guerilla war waged by Germanic tribes against the Romans, and the nomadic way of life that it necessitated. Not until the twelfth century did the apple return to the northern region, helped on its way as the horticultural skills developed in the monasteries. Good apples require grafting and nursing and that process has been so dynamic and has transformed the different types of apple so radically that the names of the varieties which were previously cultivated now sound exotic and foreign.

In the eighteenth century the apple, in the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, attained a science of its own – meticulously illustrated compendiums of pomology and faithful wax replicas of different types of apple now illustrated its development. Today apple production is a large-scale industry, and there is no longer much respect for the apple’s fine inner balance of hormones and photosynthesis, which has a decisive influence on the taste. The multiplicity of types of apple is also on the way back. Karen Syberg celebrates this diminutive fruit with the enormous range it truly deserves. An entire history of the world unfolds from its sweet interior.

EXTRACT

The apple was originally the illegitimate child of an affair between a primitive plum and a kind of shrub which really belongs to the Spiraea family.

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