Frome in Wessex
A note on the history of traditional cider and cider apples
Abstract
Contents Updated: Monday, 3 March 2008
Malus domestica
The homely apple tree Malus domestica may appear unassuming, but its creative powers are world class. The apple is a fruit with global appeal, a myriad varieties—there are literally around 10,000 cultivars worldwide. The mystery is how they got to be so different. So who or what should we thank for this splendid plant, from which a heavenly profusion of apple diversity has been coaxed? Gail Vines explained.
The Romans were most likely the reason edible apples came to Britain. But where did the Romans get their large and luscious fruits? The Romans knew about grafting, a clever way of propagating a particular variety that sidesteps the genetic lottery of seeds. They had learned it from the Greeks, who had learned it from the Persians some 2300 years ago, and they from the Babylonians who discovered it about 3800 years ago. Apples began to come west with the Persian empire. But where exactly did they come from?
Somewhere in Central Asia was everyone’s guess. Yet tradition has it that the modern domesticated apple is a hybrid, the result of chance crosses among wild species growing along the east-west trading route known to us as the Silk Road. Travellers took the most appealing fruits westwards, and the Persians propagated the choicest varieties. Then the Romans carried them to the furthest reaches of their empire. The varieties underwent further hybridisation with other cultivars and probably with wild species too. That’s the conventional story.
Plucking in Central Asia
In 1998, Barrie Juniper of Oxford university set off to find wild apples in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, ancient staging posts along the trade route. He found a virtually treeless landscape, stripped bare by generations of nomads’ goats. So in a borrowed Russian jeep and with heavily armed local guides, travelled hundreds of kilometres east to the Heavenly Mountains of Tien Shan. There, beyond the reaches of the goats, they found apples galore, growing wild. He took DNA samples from more than 100 trees, simply plucking three leaves from each tree, tearing them up and putting them in a plastic bag with a spoonful of silica gel, ready for DNA extraction back at the lab.
The following year, an expedition went further through the Tien Shan into the Ili Valley of southern China, and then to Kyrgyzstan. The results from all the expeditions were startlingly consistent. Modern apples, wherever they come from, all share genetic sequences with only one Central Asian species, Malus sieversii. The implication is that all the apples we eat today are descended from this one species from the forests of Tien Shan.
Since the Romans arrived, deliberate breeding has created many new varieties—hybrids of existing cultivars. Other varieties have arisen as “wildings”, grown from pips shed by a discarded apple core. But all this genetic mixing seems to have happened with apples that were already domesticated. No one would consume the small, bitter fruits of the now rare native British crab apple Malus sylvestris by choice. Plant breeders found out long ago that hybrids of cultivated varieties of apple and other species such as the native crab were always a waste of time, producing tiny fruits.
It’s apparently the same story throughout most of the world. Local wild species have made no contribution to the domesticated apple’s gene pool. For some reason, the species that evolved in Tien Shan is so well endowed genetically that it has generated a huge number of varieties without any input from other species. Further sampling of Central Asian apple trees is needed to clinch the argument.
Apple Evolution
So just how did this remarkable fruit evolve? Millions of years ago, it started off much like the other 20 or so wild species still growing in central and southern China, with small fruits bearing hard but edible seeds that were spread by fruit eating birds. Meanwhile, the Tien Shan mountains began to rise out of the ancient Tethys Ocean. Suddenly isolated in mountainous hills and valleys, our proto apple found a Shangri-La. There was plenty of time to evolve, as these high, spiky peaks have never been glaciated. Over some 10 million years, forests grew up and our ancestral apple tree found itself surrounded by deer, wild pig and bears, all with an inordinate fondness for fruit.
As these beasts selected the largest and juiciest apples, the small, cherry like delicacy favoured by birds gave way to a large, mammal friendly fruit. Even the seeds changed into hard, poisonous ones that would pass unscathed through a mammal’s gut. And emerging in a nutrient rich bear dropping gave the pips an excellent start in life. By the time people turned up in the region, between 5000 and 8000 years ago, the apple as we know it had nearly evolved. It was poised to head west, helped by the now domesticated horse, which probably carried it in both saddlebag and gut.
Not everyone is yet sold on this story. Devotees of cider, made from bitter apple varieties, argue that there could be a bit of crab in some old cultivars. But early in their history, the wild crabs of Europe and North America were shunted onto evolutionary branch lines, and now they’re not going anywhere that would ever make Homo sapiens’s mouth water. If we’d never had anything but these bitter little fruits, we’d probably be in Eden still. Adam and Eve simply wouldn’t have been tempted.
