Apple was a healer before she was a sinner
A seasonal guide to earth's most complex fruit
Happy Autumn Equinox! This is the first official seasonal guide for paid subscribers as we dive into the medicine of apple. Next week we’ll follow up with a writing meditation and sketching tutorial to understand apple on a more intimate level.
Apple has been given grief since “In the beginning…,” when she learned that feeding people and teaching them to know themselves can be a dangerous thing. She became associated with snakes, shame, and fig leaves, and it’s been all dance lessons, curtsies and domestication from there. Apple is the witch of the wild wood forced to clean up and come in for tea. But a skirt and pumps can’t hide her knowledge of the circling stars and cycling seasons, the deep loam of the earth and the warm weep of a summer rain.
Apple asks, “What have you forbidden yourself?”
~ The Herbarium by Maia Toll
Not far from here, there’s an old gnarled apple tree that sits at a crossroads. It clings to its blood red fruit deep into winter after the rest of the apple trees have given their bounty back to the soil. A solitary orange cat sits at its roots watching the cars drive by, the tree’s guardian or maybe its old companion who whispers local gossip each day.
It’s fitting that the tree and the cat congregate here where two roads cross, a place where many cultures believe other worlds could be accessed. An infamous place of magic-making, witches and wishes made by the shadow of night. There’s something there I can’t quite grasp, a secret between tree and cat.
Whenever I see a wild apple tree, this sense of mystery and time travel comes to the surface. You see their twisted branches reaching over abandoned fences, standing sentinel by caved-in farmhouses, weaving into the tapestry of a woodland.
I wonder about their story. They don’t easily naturalize like other trees. Their seeds must be firmly planted by some other force. Often, any hint of their origin has already been eroded by time.
Whose hands sowed them so long ago? Did they rest under its shade after a day in the field? Or was it planted by some traveling bear or horse, the chosen gardeners of the apple, as they bury the seed deep into the loam with their heavy feet? (It was the horse after all that spread apple throughout the Eurasian continent thousands of years ago as humans traveled the Silk Road.)
There’s an air about these wild apple trees that seem suspended in time, as if waiting for their original sowers to return to pick their fruit. Instead, the apples usually hang unnoticed and abandoned by those who pass by, or even those whose land they share. The tree quietly carries on with its life cycle, blooming beautifully in the spring only to fall to the ground in the autumn without the touch of a human hand.
I’ve had the distinct feeling at different times throughout the years that certain plants desperately want to be worked with, harvested, thinned, pruned, their bounty picked and shared with their human kin. Plants that were once held sacred, but are now simply left to their own devices. Apple is one of those plants.
The owner knows nothing of it. The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing on the green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its fruit.
~ Thoreau
Luckily, there are still so many old trees left in wild places, parks, abandoned corners and backyards for us to reconnect with. Their medicine may have been forgotten, but it hasn’t been lost.