04/Harvest journal
Botany, philosophy, art and literature. About the yield and about what cannot be seen: the good soil, the sun, the hills, the harvest.
The ancestor of the domestic apple still grows wild in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan; the city of Almaty takes its name from it. From there, along the caravan roads, the apple reached every garden in Europe and every story: the apple of discord, the golden apples of the Hesperides, the apple in the Romanian tale of Prâslea the Brave. Cézanne said he wanted to astonish Paris with an apple. We only want to press it properly.
Aronia comes from eastern North America, where native peoples dried it and mixed it into winter food. Its cultivation gradually spread across Europe, including through experimental gardens and orchards in the east. It is a modest shrub that asks for little soil and does not fear frost. Its berries are a deep colour: almost black, almost violet, like writing ink.
The blueberry is a dwarf mountain plant of the heather family, living in symbiosis with the fungi in the acid soil of spruce forests. Its fruit stains the tongue, the hands and, if you are careless, the shirt. In the Carpathians it is picked from late July onwards, bent over, with a wooden comb.
Chekhov wrote an entire play about a cherry orchard that has to be cut down and the people who cannot bring themselves to do it. The sour cherry comes from around the Black Sea and the Caucasus and was carried by the Romans across Europe. It is a tree that bears fruit even when nobody tends it, which says something about it.
Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about blackberry picking, about gathering them in a bucket and how, the next day, they are no longer the same. The blackberry is not one berry but a cluster of small ones, each with its own seed. It ripens in August, on hills and in the mountains, exactly when summer begins to tire.
The garden strawberry does not exist in nature. It was born in France, around 1750, from the meeting of a species from Chile with one from Virginia, carried home by travellers on ships. Bosch painted giant strawberries in The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Bergman gave their name to a film about old age. The fruit that seems simplest has the most tangled story.
The Latin name, Rubus idaeus, comes from Mount Ida, where, says Pliny the Elder, the Greeks picked wild raspberries. Legend has it the fruit was white until the nymph Ida pricked herself picking it and reddened it with her blood. The raspberry is a plant of light: it grows in clearings, where forests were cut, and disappears when the forest returns.
Homer mentions pears in the Odyssey, in the garden of King Alcinous, where the trees bear fruit all year. The pear is a close relative of the apple but fussier: it does not ripen well on the tree and must be picked hard, then left to finish in the crate. In Banat, old pear trees still stand at the edges of villages, as tall as houses.
The white layer on a plum’s skin is not dust but a wax the fruit makes for itself, so as not to lose water. Hiroshige painted a flowering plum tree that Van Gogh copied, stroke by stroke. In Banat the plum is the tree by the house: it gives the autumn jam and the winter brandy, and its wood is the best for smoking.
The Romans called it the Armenian apple, hence the Latin name, but the apricot comes from China, where it has been grown for over four thousand years. It travelled the Silk Road, through Persia and Armenia, to the gardens of the Mediterranean. It is the tree that flowers first, sometimes too early, which is why apricot years are good years.
The gooseberry is a thorny shrub of the currant family that thrives in cool gardens and on shaded hills. The berry is translucent, its veins showing, like a small lamp. In nineteenth-century England there were contests for the largest gooseberry; in Banat it made the first jam of the year, in early summer.
The black mulberry comes from Persia and reached Europe along the Silk Road, although silkworms prefer the white mulberry. The fruit is so fragile that it is harvested by shaking the tree over a spread cloth. Ovid tells in the Metamorphoses how mulberries, white at first, were darkened by the blood of Pyramus and Thisbe. In the villages of Banat, the old mulberry by the gate is still where children gather in June.
The blackthorn flowers white before its leaves, when the hills are still bare; that is why the cold spell of early April is called a blackthorn winter. The fruit is small, blue with bloom and so astringent it cannot be eaten until the frost has touched it. It once made ink and dye for wool, and its wood made walking sticks.
The golden apple of the Hesperides was most probably a quince: the Greeks dedicated it to Aphrodite and placed it in the bridal chamber. In Banat the quince sits in autumn on the wardrobe, among the linen, to scent it, and is made into jelly and baked quinces. It is the fruit that does not hurry: picked late, ripening slowly, keeping all winter.
