I read a quarter of Michael Pollan's book, The Botany of Desire - it's about four domesticated species, the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato, and I have only read the bit on the apple - and while I don't much care for his style of writing, which is unnecessarily chatty, he does have an image of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) wearing a sack for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat, snoozing in one of two canoes lashed together, floating downriver, a mound of seed in the other canoe. Chapman would not graft trees; he would only grow trees from seed; and so his apples were hard and sour, and good only for cider. That's why everyone in the frontier towns welcomed Chapman: not because an apple a day kept the doctor away (a PR slogan thought up by the apple growers later), but because he brought alcohol. Pollan quotes Emerson: "man would be more solitary, less friended, less supported, if the land yielded only the useful maize and potato, [and] withheld this ornamental and social fruit". He quotes a speaker to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1885: "The desire of the Puritan, distant from help and struggling for bare existence, to add the Pippin to his slender list of comforts, and the sour 'syder' to cheer his heart and liver, must be considered a fortunate circumstance". First found in the Kazakh forests. Each apple contains enough genetic material to be entirely unlike its parent, even more unlike than human beings are; but we have deliberately sweetened our apples (through grafting) and the legend of Johnny Appleseed. Pollan delights in the names of apples in the 19th century: the Bottle Greening, the Sheepnose, the Oxheart, the Yellow Bellflower, the Black Gilliflower, the Twenty-Ounce Pippin; the Westfield Seek-No-Further, the Hubbardston Nonesuch, the Rhode Island Greening, the Albemarle Pippin, the York Imperial, the Kentucky Red Streak, the Long Stem of Pennsylvania, the Ladies Favorite of Tennessee, the King of Tompkins County, the Peach of Kentucky, the American Nonpareille; the Baldwin, the Macintosh, the Jonathan, McAfee's Red, Norton's Melon, Moyer's Prize, Mezger's Calville, Kirke's Golden Reinette, Kelly's White, Walker's Beauty; Wismer's Dessert, Jacob's Sweet Winter, the Early Harvest and Cider Apple, the Clothes-Yard Apple, the Bread and Cheese, Cornell's Savewell and Putnam's Savewell, Paradise Winter, Payne's Late Keeper, and Hay's Winter Wine.
Apples remind me of an excerpt from a letter from John Szarkowski to Helmut Wohl, in a book of Szarkowski's letters and photographs, generously given by Dennis: "The apple book is a treasure, and demonstrates what I have long suspected - that the history of art is in fact a branch of pomology. ...There is of course one serious problem underlying the consideration of the apple in ancient times, which is that neither Greek nor Hebrew seems to have a specific word for 'apple', but generic words roughly translatable as 'an edible fruit approximately the size of a tennis ball'. This of course puts a very heavy load of responsibility on the visual record, which - frankly - is a poor place to put it. Those ancient sculptors who did the apples of the Hesperides, etc., felt that the difference between a peach and pomegranate was nothing to worry about, as along as one got the drapery right..." The facing page of the book has a photograph of a wooden wall with two windows (one with a reflection of leaves) and a tiny, brave, young Cox Pippin tree outside. C. 1983.
I haven't yet found a place to hang your gigantic black-and-white print of a hand holding three apples, though I asked for it as a gift.