For the Love of 

Apple Trees

Part 1

I’m sitting in our orchard on a gentle April evening watching the apple blossoms that are just starting to emerge. The pink, swelling buds giving way to delicate five-petal flowers, studying the trees like stars. Some trees are already in the fullness of their flowering, others are still awaiting their moment. The experience fills me with a deep wild joy, a mixture of the bursting excitement of spring and the abundance of leaf and fruit to come, the bittersweet knowing of an exquisite moment that will soon pass, so intrinsic to the way of nature, and a deeper richness of gratitude.

I think I’ve always been in love with apple trees. The garden of my early childhood was blessed with several gnarled old grandmother specimens which radiated a comforting sense of the familiar and homely. Two of them I remember had a washing line strung between them, another had a small plank nailed across a couple of boughs, just big enough to sit on (with a toy or two for company), just high enough to feel dangerous. I would sit up there for hours in my tiny ‘tree-house’. Then there was the challenge of picking (each fruit individually cupped in a small wire basket on the end of a long pole) and the delicious things my mum made from them, inspired by her German-Jewish mother’s hand-me-down recipes. 

Apples are one of those select plant species that has allowed itself to participate in a symbiosis with us humans. We still do have a little cultural veneration of the apple in this country, revived in recent years, as many old ways have been since we started to realise what we’ve lost in modern times. I’m looking forward to our apple harvest in autumn this year, and it’s incredible to be able to reduce our food miles and eat them straight from the trees. But for me it’s not just about getting a sustainable yield of fruit (or a nice place to sit and write). There’s an experience of connectedness to life when living close to the land, working with the plants, in relationship with the plant and animal realms, that imbues the world with immense power and meaning. A resonant vibration that is flowing through all of nature that can be felt and experienced and lived in. To truly listen to life with the heart is an on-going practice which can bear it’s own interesting kinds of fruit in one’s life. 

Working with apple trees in this way, I have been learning about many practical techniques as well as the history and culture of apples, which I would like to share with you over the next year. Propagating, grafting, what you can make from the fruit, about tame apples and wild ones, orchards and apple forests.  I’m in no way an expert in any of it, but it’s good to share experiences. And as the apple is a precious and prolific friend in this temperate climate, who can help us live sustainably on this land, I think everyone should know how easy and rewarding they are to work with. Many of the techniques I’d like to share also apply to other fruit trees, but apples are the easiest and most accessible to begin with. 

But before any of that, I hope you can get a chance to step away from the screen, or today’s ‘to do’ list and find an apple tree to sit with for a little while. Remember you’re ultimately made of very similar stuff, your blood a cousin to its chlorophyll, your breath exchanging life-giving gases. Feel you own beating heart align with its heartwood, climb it if you can or curl up underneath where you can touch its bark skin. Perhaps you already know it well, perhaps this is the first time since you were a kid that you’ve been so intimate with a tree. Perhaps this is the start of something beautiful…. 

Looking forward to sharing more of the love of Apple trees with you over coming year.

Emma