Apples on the Web: Apples and People

IT STARTS WITH A MAP

My love of apples goes without saying, but I am especially beguiled by their human-facing side: the stories and customs and lore around them, the names we give apples, the magic, history, spirit, and significance they lend us as we endow the same to them.

Those intangibles are the heart of a new website, profoundly English and with an impressive roster of sponsors and funders.

I would usually give a new online resource like Apples and People more time to grow and find its way before writing about it.

Yet the stories created there since its debut at the start of the year have been so worthwhile and sure footed that it would be unforgivable to hold out on you for another day.

Nonetheless the site is very much a work in progress—one that you can follow as eagerly as I.

Apples and People

The contributions there so far include a map, a poem, an exploration of the wassail, and an essay on the apple and its botanical cousin, the rose.

Apples and People promises more than 40 stories over the next 18 months. 

Many of the stories feature and link to art about apples.

There is also a four-part exhibition planned in apple-rich Herefordshire, the geographical locus of this project.

That would be plenty to celebrate, but the site also has a Journal of Apples that currently profiles three of the artists whose representations of the pomaceous fruit will be featured in the exhibitions.

Highlights

The Apple and the Rose links genetics, the apple's origins, and the story of Saint Dorothy, a martyr whose death was marked by heavenly fruit and flowers.

Wassail illustrates the ancient custom of drinking the health of the trees with many images, and finds for us the original Welsh proverb about daily apples and health that survives today in a more familiar form.

Cezanne's Painted Apples shows us how "Cézanne’s mission was to radically rethink how three-dimensional objects could be captured in paint and incorporate multiple viewpoints instead of one-point perspective."

Fruit of the Heavenly Mountains, the pomme fruit's origin story, knits geography with the life of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet botanist who championed the theory "that the domestic apple stems from the fruit forests of wild apple Malus sieversii on the slopes of the Tian Shan" mountains. This theory is widely accepted today.

Art

Mangzi-Tian is a painter who sees apples as planets. Barnaby Bradford "uses the humble fruit to explore fundamental questions driving human nature." A page features a reading of Tōson Shimazaki's 1892 poem of "dreamy love and growing up, set amongst apple trees."

Follow Along

Were my blog a magazine and I the editor, I should want it to be very much like Apples and People.

The site has an email newsletter so that we can follow its progress. Wassail to them!

Note: All my links.