Apples

 “A tree doesn’t post its blossoms. A river doesn’t explain its course. Nature teaches us that presence is enough.”

― Lawrence Nault

On the experience of the long haul flight. “The meal cart appears two hours in. You can hear it banging into passengers’ knees before you see it, and the sound causes the entire cabin to sit up slightly, like meerkats detecting motion on the savanna.”

From BBC Earth, the trailer for Evolution, a five-part series premiering on PBS in October. “Ponder this: All the incredible diversity of animal life on Earth sprang from a single organism. Every animal, no matter how weird, is related to every other.”

AbeBooks: “From hand-colored renaissance engravings to a Harry Potter first edition hiding in plain sight: 30 rare sales over the years. Behind every remarkable book is a bookseller who recognized its worth and a collector who’d been searching for it. For 30 years, AbeBooks has brought them together: thousands of independent sellers worldwide, surfacing the rare, unexpected, and hard-to-find wonders for first-time seekers and lifelong collectors. An expansion from our popular Most Expensive Sales articles, these 30 extraordinary finds span centuries and defy a single definition of value. Among them: a ninth-century manuscript, irreplaceable for its age; a first-edition Moby-Dick, coveted for its place in literary history; a moon atlas assembled over 500 painstaking evenings, prized for the obsession behind it. Find inspiration by exploring the stories below…”

Found in fruit, vegetables, tea and even wine, polyphenols are today one of the most intensively studied bioactive compounds.

Although usually associated with antioxidant properties that help protect cells from damage, Oľga Pecháňová, a biochemist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV), says new research has revealed they have far more complex properties.

Slovak scientists’ art and study published in prestigious journal Polyphenols currently in scientific spotlight.

This is a lovely short documentary about a project called Some Interesting Apples, which aims to find apples growing in unusual places (i.e. not commercial orchards but in places where people tend to discard apple cores):

The last three years I have been involved with a project called ‘Some Interesting Apples’, the primary aim of which is to record and, where characteristics make desirable (and sometimes where they don’t), preserve wilding apples, i.e., domestic apples growing on their own roots as the result of a discarded core.

Some of the best apples are then cultivated in an orchard dedicated to wild apples:

The ‘Some Interesting Apples’ project collects apples from wild trees that have been grown using cores thrown away — many from car windows or dropped from walkers and animals.

The wild trees or ‘wildlings’ are trees that grow from those apple cores discarded in hedges and along train tracks, footpaths and roadsides.

Their fruit often goes uneaten or rots — but have now instead be used to create a unique orchard.

The orchard has been developed from dropped fruit from more than 600 apple wildings in Cornwall.

It has now created Wilding Mother Orchard - the first ever orchard in the UK solely dedicated to cultivating wild-grown, chance-seedling apples.

The discovered apple varieties are named for their what3words locations; they have names like Horse Wish Gossip, Panes House Taxi, and Autumn Mushroom Spoke.

Apples are super interesting. I read it years ago now, but I still often think of Michael Pollan’s chapter on apples in The Botany of Desire.