The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (3 page)

The silk route traverses some of these forests, and it seems likely that travelers passing through would have picked the biggest and tastiest of these fruits to take with them on their journey west. Along the way seeds were dropped, wildlings sprouted, and
Malus
hybridized freely with related species, such as the European crab apples, eventually producing millions of novel apple types all through Asia and Europe. Most of these would have yielded unpalatable fruit, though even these trees would have been worth growing for cider or forage.

True domestication had to await the invention of grafting by the Chinese. Sometime in the second millennium
B.C.,
the Chinese discovered that a slip of wood cut from a desirable tree could be notched into the trunk of another tree; once this graft “took,” the fruit produced on new wood growing out from that juncture would share the characteristics of its more desirable parent. This technique is what eventually allowed the Greeks and Romans to select and propagate the choicest specimens. At this point the apple seems to have settled down for a while. According to Pliny, the Romans cultivated twenty-three different varieties of apples, some of which they took with them to England. The tiny, oblate Lady apple, which still shows up in markets at Christmastime, is thought to be one of these.

As Thoreau suggested in an 1862 essay in praise of wild apples, this most “civilized” of trees followed the westward course of empire, from the ancient world to Europe and then on to America with the early settlers. Much like the Puritans, who regarded their crossing to America as a kind of baptism or rebirth, the apple couldn’t cross the Atlantic without changing its identity—a fact that encouraged generations of Americans to hear echoes of their own story in the story of this fruit. The apple in America became a parable.

The earliest immigrants to America had brought grafted Old World apple trees with them, but in general these trees fared poorly in their new home. Harsh winters killed off many of them outright; the fruit of others was nipped in the bud by late-spring frosts unknown in England. But the colonists also planted seeds, often saved from apples eaten during their Atlantic passage, and these seedling trees, called “pippins,” eventually prospered (especially after the colonists imported honeybees to improve pollination, which had been spotty at first). Ben Franklin reported that by 1781 the fame of the Newtown Pippin, a homegrown apple discovered in a Flushing, New York, cider orchard, had already spread to Europe.

In effect, the apple, like the settlers themselves, had to forsake its former domestic life and return to the wild before it could be reborn as an American—as Newtown Pippins and Baldwins, Golden Russets and Jonathans. This is what the seeds on John Chapman’s boat were doing. (It may also be what Chapman was doing.) By reverting to wild ways—to sexual reproduction, that is, and going to seed—the apple was able to reach down into its vast store of genes, accumulated over the course of its travels through Asia and Europe, and discover the precise combination of traits required to survive in the New World. The apple probably also found some of what it needed by hybridizing with the wild American crabs, which are the only native American apple trees. Thanks to the species’ inherent prodigality, coupled with the work of individuals like John Chapman, in a remarkably short period of time the New World had its own apples, adapted to the soil and climate and day length of North America, apples that were as distinct from the old European stock as the Americans themselves.

• • •

From Brilliant, I followed the course of the Ohio down toward Marietta. Moving south, the landscape begins to relax, the steep, rocky hillsides that leap up from the river near Wheeling reclining into rich-looking farmland. It was the first week of October, a Sunday, and many of the cornfields had been only partially shaved, presenting a cartoon of work interrupted. In some fields the tall dun corn had been cut away to reveal an old-time oil derrick. The first oil fields in America were found just outside Marietta; a farmer digging his well would notice bubbles of natural gas percolating through the water—the unmistakable scent of hitting it big. (Before then, discovering a great apple tree in one’s cider orchard had been the ticket.) Most of the oil rigs are stilled and rusted, but now and then I spotted one still pumping lustily away as if the year were 1925.

In Marietta, I stopped in at the Campus Martius Museum, a small brick history museum devoted to Ohio’s pioneer days, when Marietta served as the gateway to the Northwest Territory. The first thing a visitor encounters is a sprawling tabletop diorama showing what the area looked like in 1788. That was the year a Revolutionary War hero named Rufus Putnam, who had won a charter for his Ohio Company from the Continental Congress, arrived here with a small party of men. Their families would follow a few months later, after the men had constructed the small walled settlement that formerly stood on this spot.

Eighteenth-century maps on the walls trace an intricately ramifying tree of rivers and streams reaching north from the Muskingum’s trunk, connecting the dots of a scatter of place-names that quickly thins to blankness. The maps force you to think of Ohio in an unaccustomed way, no longer as a middle but as a beginning, an edge. That, of course, was what this place was in 1801, when Chapman first stood here: America’s threshold place, the cliff of everything unknown and yet to be—unless, of course, you happened to be a Delaware or Wyandot, for whom the very notion of wilderness was an error or a lie. But for a white American in 1801, Marietta was the last stop before stepping over the edge.

In 1801 one of the things you could buy in Marietta before heading into the interior was apple trees. Soon after his arrival, Rufus Putnam had himself planted a nursery on the opposite bank of the Ohio, so that he might sell trees to the pioneers passing through. What was surprising about this was that the apples Putnam sold were not grown from seeds: they were grafted trees. In fact, his nursery offered a selection of the well-known eastern varieties—the Roxbury Russets, Newtown Pippins, and Early Chandlers that had already made their names in colonial New England.

What this meant, of course, was that John Chapman’s apples were neither the first in Ohio nor by any stretch the best, for his were seedling trees exclusively. Chapman, somewhat perversely, would have nothing to do with grafted trees. “They can improve the apple in that way,” he’s supposed to have said, “but that is only a device of man, and it is wicked to cut up trees that way. The correct method is to select good seeds and plant them in good ground and God only can improve the apple.”

So what, exactly, was unique about Chapman’s operation, and why did it succeed? Apart from his almost fanatical devotion to apples planted from seed, his business was distinguished by its portability: his willingness to pack up and move his apple tree operation to keep pace with the ever-shifting frontier. Like a shrewd real estate developer (which is one way to describe him), Chapman had a sixth sense for exactly where the next wave of development was about to break. There he would go and plant his seeds on a tract of waterfront land (sometimes paid for, sometimes not), confident in the expectation that a few years hence a market for his trees would appear at his doorstep. By the time the settlers came, he’d have two- to three-year-old trees ready for sale at six and a half cents apiece. Chapman was evidently the only appleman on the American frontier pursuing such a strategy. It would have large consequences for both the frontier and the apple.

• • •

If a man had the temperament for it and didn’t care about starting a family or putting down roots, selling apple trees along the shifting edge of the frontier was not a bad little business. Apples were precious on the frontier, and Chapman could be sure of a strong demand for his seedlings, even if most of them would yield nothing but spitters. He was selling, cheaply, something everybody wanted—something, in fact, everybody in Ohio needed by law. A land grant in the Northwest Territory specifically required a settler to “set out at least fifty apple or pear trees” as a condition of his deed. The purpose of the rule was to dampen real estate speculation by encouraging homesteaders to put down roots. Since a standard apple tree normally took ten years to fruit, an orchard was a mark of lasting settlement.

An orchard is also an idealized or domesticated version of a forest, and the transformation of a shadowy tract of wilderness into a tidy geometry of apple trees offered a visible, even stirring, proof that a pioneer had mastered the primordial forest. Compared to the awesome majesty of the old-growth trees the early settlers encountered, the modesty of an apple tree, the way it obligingly takes on the forms we give it, holding out its fruit and flowers so near to hand, must have been a tremendous comfort on the frontier.

That’s one reason planting an orchard became one of the earliest ceremonies of settlement on the American frontier; the other was the apples themselves. It takes a leap of the historical imagination to appreciate just how much the apple meant to people living two hundred years ago. By comparison, the apple in our eye is a fairly inconsequential thing—a popular fruit (second only to the banana) but nothing we can’t imagine living without. It is much harder for us to imagine living without the experience of
sweetness,
however, and sweetness, in the widest, oldest sense, is what the apple offered an American in Chapman’s time, the desire it helped gratify.

Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth-century America. Even after cane plantations were established in the Caribbean, it remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most Americans. (Later on, cane sugar became so closely identified with the slave trade that many Americans avoided buying it on principle.) Before the English arrived, and for some time after, there were no honeybees in North America, therefore no honey to speak of; for a sweetener, Indians in the north had relied on maple sugar instead. It wasn’t until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter the lives of very many Americans (and most of them lived on the eastern seaboard); before then the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of fruit. And in America that usually meant the apple.

• • •

Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there. Or at least it
didn’t
end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain kind of perfection. When writers like Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold used the expression “sweetness and light” to name their highest ideal (Swift called them “the two noblest of things”; Arnold, the ultimate aim of civilization), they were drawing on a sense of the word
sweetness
going back to classical times, a sense that has largely been lost to us. The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare calls spring the “sweet o’ the year.” Lent by the tongue to all the other sense organs, “sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the
Oxford English Dictionary,
is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word
sweetness
denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.

Since then sweetness has lost much of its power and become slightly . . . well, saccharine. Who now would think of sweetness as a “noble” quality? At some point during the nineteenth century, a hint of insincerity began to trail the word through literature, and in our time it’s usually shadowed by either irony or sentimentality. Overuse probably helped to cheapen the word’s power on the tongue, but I think the advent of cheap sugar in Europe, and perhaps especially cane sugar produced by slaves, is what did the most to discount sweetness, both as an experience and as a metaphor. (The final insult came with the invention of synthetic sweeteners.) Both the experience and the metaphor seem to me worth recovering, if for no other reason than to appreciate the apple’s former power.

Start with the taste. Imagine a moment when the sensation of honey or sugar on the tongue was an astonishment, a kind of intoxication. The closest I’ve ever come to recovering such a sense of sweetness was secondhand, though it left a powerful impression on me even so. I’m thinking of my son’s first experience of sugar: the icing on the cake at his first birthday. I have only the testimony of Isaac’s face to go by (that, and his fierceness to repeat the experience), but it was plain that his first encounter with sugar had intoxicated him—was in fact an ecstasy, in the literal sense of that word. That is, he was beside himself with the pleasure of it, no longer here with me in space and time in quite the same way he had been just a moment before. Between bites Isaac gazed up at me in amazement (he was on my lap, and I was delivering the ambrosial forkfuls to his gaping mouth) as if to exclaim, “Your world contains
this
? From this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it.” (Which he basically has done.) And I remember thinking, this is no minor desire, and then wondered: Could it be that sweetness is the prototype of
all
desire?

• • •

Anthropologists have found that cultures vary enormously in their liking for bitter, sour, and salty flavors, but a taste for sweetness appears to be universal. This goes for many animals, too, which shouldn’t be surprising, since sugar is the form in which nature stores food energy. As with most mammals, our first experience of sweetness comes with our mother’s milk. It could be that we acquire a taste for it at the breast, or we may be born with an instinct for sweet things that makes us desire mother’s milk.

Either way, sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation, allowing the plant to expand its range. As parties to this grand coevolutionary bargain, animals with the strongest predilection for sweetness and plants offering the biggest, sweetest fruits prospered together and multiplied, evolving into the species we see, and are, today. As a precaution, the plants took certain steps to protect their seeds from the avidity of their partners: they held off on developing sweetness and color until the seeds had matured completely (before then fruits tend to be inconspicuously green and unpalatable), and in some cases (like the apple’s), the plants developed poisons in their seeds to ensure that
only
the sweet flesh is consumed.