Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  The sun was mounting, and the tin roof of Gerald’s listing farmhouse seemed to wobble in the heat as we drove away past the big ironbark with the fallen bough. Our dust trail led back through the forest to Roy Matthews’s sawmill, the Gallagher Insultimber Partnership at the edge of Barradine. Ironbark, Eucalyptus leucoxylon, grows strongly in many parts of the Pilliga woods and refuses to conduct electricity. It also lives up to its name in strength and hardness, so almost the busiest machine in Roy Matthews’s sawmill was the electric grinder. A queue of big circular saw discs hung up on the wall beside it: each saw must be sharpened three times a day. The job used to be done by hand, with files, and Eric records in A Million Wild Acres how Bert Ruttley, who worked for Jack Underwood at the Rocky Creek Mill for thirty years, would wear out four files every weekend, gulleting the circular saws to lengthen their worn teeth.

  Ironbarks were always traditionally felled by the journeymen sleeper-cutters who lived or camped in the forest. Roy built up his business making electric fence posts, much smaller in section, from the trees rejected by the sleeper-cutters as too small or twisted. Now that the last of the sleeper-cutters had left the forest, Roy’s ironbark came into the sawmill as truckloads of tree-sized logs. A big forklift moved in and carried several new logs to a conveyor. It carried them into the steel jaws of the de-barking machine, which flayed off the bark ready for the saws. Using sophisticated computer controls, the saw operator cut the ironwood into slabs one and a half inches square and just the right lengths, to be sold all over the world for a whole variety of specialized electric fences. There was very little waste. The bark was all chipped and bagged for sale to garden stores, and the sawdust went to the power-station for burning as the five per cent renewable fuel that must now be mixed with coal by law in Australia. Offcuts fell on to a conveyor and went straight to the chip mill to be ferried off by lorry on the first stage of their journey to Japan, where they would be made into some of the very finest paper.

  The ironbark fence posts were stored in pigeonholes that named and classified the different sizes of spacing posts, the ‘droppers’ that separate the wires, leaving just the right calibre of gap between them, tailored to particular animals or birds, ranging from seven-foot deer posts for Japan and Korea to something called the ‘Rabbit Peg Tie-down’ for the home market. The ‘Melbourne’ was a big eight-foot slanting dropper for spacing kangaroo fence. I spotted the puzzling ‘Frog’ and ‘Penguin’, and the six-foot ‘Emu’. Moving along the rows, I found the evocative ‘Six-Foot Special Feral Stake’, the Australian Dog Fence, useful for stopping wombats according to Roy, and a selection of droppers and posts for electric dingo fences powered by solar panels. Ironbark fence posts will last at least twenty-three years almost anywhere, wet or dry, from Denmark to New Zealand, even under snow for months at a time.

  Fences have a special importance in the history of Australia, where people managed very well without them for 40,000 years. Their sudden arrival, running in straight lines across the contours of sacred land, advertising its expropriation with the menace of barbed wire, must have puzzled and offended the native people, as perhaps they still do.

  When Roy started milling ironbark in 1979, forty sleeper-cutters were still at work out in the Pilliga. In earlier days there had been several hundred. The Pilliga Forest gave men with no capital the opportunity to work and live independently as timber-getters and sleeper-cutters. As the railways expanded across Australia, more and more sleepers were needed, and ironbark was tough and long lasting. Men would set up camp in the forest near a creek for water, then often build a house and raise a family, strapping an axe to the crossbar and riding bicycles out to new stands of trees when their home patch was cut down. Eric showed me the ancient, frayed, two-foot-six-inch butts of ironbarks the original sleeper-cutters had felled with axes, working at a comfortable height to swing the axe and avoid bending down to cut the tree from its base, regardless of the waste of good lumber.

  Having felled and trimmed the trees, the sleeper-cutters sawed them into the regulation eight-foot lengths. So strong was their spirit of independence that they would rig up a strip of tough inner tube tied to a springy bent stick driven into the ground as a ‘chinaman’ or ‘dummy’ to draw the other end of the two-man cross-cut saw and work alone. Once the tree was sawn into sleeper lengths, it had to be barked by bruising blows from the back of the axehead. Eric described the result memorably: ‘A newly barked log looks like a woman stepping out of a hot bath into cold air, exposed, goosefleshed and a little surprised.’ Then the log was split or sawn into sleepers nine inches by five. Ironbark splits well, so a selection of wedges was often driven in with a mall made of a rare, tough, highly valued timber known as Gunnedah ironbark.

  The lives of the Pilliga sleeper-cutters as recorded by Eric Rolls in A Million Wild Acres contribute to a mythology of the forest. Les Murray, whose own father was a bullock driver and timber-getter in the forests of New South Wales before he married and became a dairy farmer, compares the book to some of the Icelandic sagas in that it ‘presents a complex system greater than any of the agents in it’. Murray calls it ‘a sort of dynamic tableau, measuring some thousands of square miles by about 160 years’. But he finds an interesting difference: ‘In Rolls’s presentation, things human and non-human are all happening interrelatedly, and the humans barely stand out.’ What interests Les Murray about this is that ‘as the sagas only occasionally do, he treats his human and non-human agents pretty much on a par. This par we may call ecological consciousness, and see it as a new form of a very ancient sense of the inter-relatedness of all things.’

  East to Eden

  I am travelling to Kazakhstan, propelled by a story told to me by Barrie Juniper that is something between the Book of Genesis and the Just So Stories: How the Apple Began. Beside a black mulberry tree he planted thirty years ago outside the porters’ lodge at St Catherine’s College Oxford, I met Barrie, a don of the college, luminary of the Oxford Plant Sciences Department and apple guru. Ruby stains of the fallen mulberries smudged the paving stones. I had heard of Juniper’s pioneering work in tracking down the origins of the domestic apple to the Tien Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan and had come to sit at his feet and learn more. Over lunch, he outlined the long journey of the domestic apple from the wild fruit forests of the Tien Shan along the so-called Silk Road to the west. In the course of that journey, Juniper has discovered, the wild apple of the Tien Shan, Malus sieversus, evolved into the domestic apple, Malus domesticus, and eventually found its way to Britain with the Romans.

  Barrie Juniper spent years searching for the ancestors of the domestic apple. He reckoned there were now some 20,000 varieties in the world including over 6,000 recorded in Britain. Many of the old varieties that haven’t died out altogether have become rarities, so Juniper realized that mapping out their genetic identities through DNA samples was a matter of urgency. In 1998 he travelled to Central Asia with some Oxford colleagues in search of the ur-apple. They went to Kazakhstan, to Alma-Ata, now known as Almaty. Alma-Ata is usually translated as ‘Father of all Apples’, although there is a school of thought in Kazakhstan that believes it is more accurately rendered as ‘Where the Apples Are’. It had taken Juniper over a year’s struggle with Kazakh official protocol to get permission to visit the outlying regions of the Tien Shan Mountains in search of wild apples, but eventually he and his companions set out from Almaty in the summer of 1998 under military escort to the remote mountain slopes known as the Djunguarian Alatau. Here they found forests of wild fruit: wild pears, plums, apricots, hawthorns, rowans and apples. The apples were all Malus sieversii, and their fruits varied enormously in size, shape and flavour, from the hard and the tart to apples that tasted and looked remarkably like our own familiar cultivated apples.

  They collected apple specimens and took them home to Oxford, where they analysed their DNA and discovered that Malus sieversii shows a far closer affinity with the domestic apple than with any other wild species. But how coul
d all the thousands of varieties of the domestic apple have descended from the wild fruit forests of the Tien Shan? To add to the mystery, Malus sieversii is reluctant to hybridize with other species. So how did all these variations on the theme of the eating apple arise? What makes the apple such a chameleon? The answer, in a word, is that apple trees are heterozygous. Plant the pips of a hundred apples from the same tree and the new generation of trees can differ, often dramatically, from their parents and from each other. This is how new kinds of apples have arisen by chance over the centuries: people taking a fancy to this or that new fruit, then propagating from that particular tree by taking cuttings from the shoots and grafting them on to other trees. All Bramley seedlings are descended from a single tree in someone’s back garden in Northampton. And so on, down thousands of years, so every single kind of eating apple in the world is a direct descendant of the apples that evolved in the forests of the Tien Shan.

  After lunch, Barrie Juniper and I sat down in the fellows’ common room over coffee and the Times Atlas, which we opened at Central Asia. He began to explain how he thinks the domestic apple evolved; a story that ranged from the Yangtze Valley, to Neolithic Mesopotamia, to the orchards of Oxford. According to Juniper, Malus, the botanical family to which all apples belong, first evolved about twelve million years ago. To judge from the twenty-odd wild species that still exist in central and southern China, it probably bore a small fruit with hard but edible seeds not unlike those of its close relation, the rowan tree. The seeds would have been spread by birds. A small group of species penetrated north-west through the fertile country that is now Gansu Province into the area that was to become the Tien Shan Mountains as they arose in the same geological upheaval that created the Himalayas. Juniper believed that just one or possibly two of these ‘bird apple’ seeds was lifted over the rising hills to the Tien Shan and the valley of the Ili River, most likely in the crop or faeces of a migrating bird. The spread of the inhospitable Gobi Desert then prevented any migration of apple seed back to the east, and although they were walled in by glaciation to the west, the ice never reached these mountains.

  In the foothills and valleys of the Tien Shan range, the new apple found itself in a genuine paradise. Bears, deer and wild pigs lived in the spreading woodlands, eating the wild fruit in autumn and selecting the sweeter, juicier apples while bees laboured in the pollination department of the same evolutionary project. The bears, living in the abundant caves of the Tien Shan, were avid fruit-eaters, and pips could pass through their guts unharmed to germinate in the dung. As Juniper pointed out, the baseball-glove claws of bears are perfectly suited to the grasping of apples. He had seen how enthusiastically they will vandalize a tree bearing a favourite sweet apple, dragging off whole branches in a kind of rough pruning. Out on the steppe, huge herds of wild horses and donkeys also browsed on the ripe apples and helped them spread westwards and south along the range towards what is now Almaty. Like the bears, they kept on selecting the larger, juicier, sweeter apples, so that as it spread west, the apple gradually became larger. At the same time this evolutionary pressure changed it from a ‘bird’ fruit with edible seeds to a ‘mammal’ fruit with poisonous seeds. The bitter taste of apple pips is cyanide, and the smooth, hard, teardrop seed coat evolved as the perfect streamlined vehicle to pass intact through an animal’s guts.

  Juniper believed that by the time the ‘new’ apple had populated the northern slopes of the eastern Tien Shan and reached near Almaty, it had evolved into something like its present size and culinary appeal. Later, as human populations began to travel back and forth along the old animal migration routes between east and west, they helped to spread the new fruit. People call these routes ‘The Silk Roads’, but they were in use five or six thousand years before the discovery of silk, which lent its name to the route only during the period from AD 0 to 400. In the early days, said Juniper, camels would have been the means of transport along the routes, but, although they are as fond of apples as any other herbivore, their digestive system is so efficient that not even apple pips will survive it. Then, around 7,000 years ago, something momentous happened on the plains of Kazakhstan. The horse was domesticated, and soon started to travel the trading routes. The more direct northern trade routes led from Shanghai and Xian via Urumchi in north-west China to Almaty, Tashkent and Bokhara, then through Anatolia all the way to the Mediterranean coast. During winter the Tien Shan Mountains were impassable in the snow, so traders took the long way round to the south. But when the snows melted in July, the caravans turned north and until the first snows in November travelled through the Ili Valley and the Tien Shan range via Almaty, passing through fruit forests on the way.

  Thanks to the relatively inefficient digestive system of the horse, the seeds of apples pass through the gut unharmed, so horses were very effective disseminators of a random variety of seedlings that grew up into flowering trees that, in turn, were naturally pollinated into yet greater permutations of genes and fruiting characteristics. Apples would also have been a highly portable source of food for both horses and traders, and must surely have travelled many hundreds of miles stashed in saddlebags. By the time the Romans introduced the domestic apple to Britain, they had learnt the secret of grafting.

  Barrie Juniper chanced on the early origins of grafting while riding his bicycle through Oxford one afternoon. He met Dr Stephanie Dalley, an orientalist, who told him about something she had seen on the wooden cuneiform tablets she was translating. They were 3,800 years old and had been discovered at Mari, on the banks of the Euphrates in Syria. Some of them depicted the grafting of vines in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, where the Babylonians are known to have experienced the problem of soil made salty through irrigation. The tablets revealed that by that time gardeners and orchardists knew how to graft grapes on to salt-tolerant rootstock. If they could graft grapes, they could almost certainly graft apples too.

  A favoured apple tree could be reliably propagated only by cutting scions from it and grafting them. Scions could be preserved and carried by driving the ends of the stems into a hard fruit such as a quince. Thus, the favoured fruit variety could be transported west and reared in the orchards of Babylon, and later in Greece, then Rome and eventually in Britain.

  In his biography of Alexander the Great, Robin Lane-Fox describes how the enterprising general took gardeners skilled in grafting from the Tigris basin home to Greece, and is known from written accounts to have trained his soldiers to fight in naval exercises in which apples were fired in broadsides as ‘blanks’. The Romans learnt to cultivate the apple from the Greeks and eventually brought it to Britain. At St Romain en Gal in the South of France, a Roman mosaic shows the progress of the apple year, from its grafting to its harvesting. The Romans grafted Malus sieversii on to the wild Malus sylvestris so that the bottom half of the tree could eventually be utilized as the ideal timber for making the cogs of waterwheels or windmills. Barrie believed the Saxons must have inherited the relict orchards of sweet Roman apples and named many places after them. He has found at least forty-seven apple place names: towns and villages such as Appleby and Appledore. The Celtic prefix af or av also signifies ‘apple’, as in Avalon or Avignon.

  Barrie thought I was mad even to consider reaching the Tien Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan without months of preparation and frankly warned me that in the face of the endless protocol entailed in securing visas and permission to visit the mountains, I would probably give up. He and his Oxford colleagues had written over 200 emails and letters in their original quest to reach the Tien Shan fruit forests. He was very nearly right. There were times when I almost did give up, as I cycled across London to the Kazakh Consulate opposite the V&A in Kensington again and again, or sat waiting there in queues in an airless office at the bottom of the basement stairs hoping for my elusive visa.

  But finally there I was, flying into Almaty at two in the morning to meet Luisa, Barrie Juniper’s friend and interpreter. Luisa is learning to drive a
nd has taken a lesson on the way out to the airport with her instructor, Johnny, who drives us back into town at breakneck speed in his Lada along wide, empty boulevards of limes with whitewashed trunks. Outside the wine factory, topiarists have sculpted the limes into giant bottles. Kazakhs, I later discover, love topiary and never pass up an opportunity to flex the shears on almost any tree. On Republic Square, outside the old House of Government building, stands a row of Central Asian elms, shaped into perfect domes like a row of soldiers in dark-green busbies. Everywhere you go in Almaty there are trees and tree-shaped fountains.

  Johnny’s Lada is dwarfed by the great sweeping forecourt of the Almaty Hotel. So is my singularly tatty rucksack, which a porter insists on carrying in without a trace of irony. The Almaty is a huge old-style Soviet hotel opposite the Opera with tiers of balconies like the decks of an ocean liner. By some miracle worked by Luisa on the unsmiling receptionists, I get a room three floors up, wonderfully tatty, complete with plugless bathroom, jammed balcony French window, TV, broken fridge and large desk. We arrange to meet in the morning, and I fall asleep instantly.

  I wake to sunlight and traffic and the brilliant surprise of the snowy tops of the Tien Shan Mountains, the Heavenly Mountains, that form the steep backdrop to the city to the south. The sun breaks over the ridge, casting a pale duck-egg shade on the snow in the topmost combs. Everything in the backlit city is silhouetted and dramatic. People move along the streets like shadow puppets. The air smells fresh and cool. The city itself is steeply raked up the mountainside, rising from two to three thousand feet in the straight lines of its original Soviet grid, with the 15,000-foot mountain wall behind. My first impression is of a Ruritanian city built in a forest: trees are everywhere, wonderfully unkempt and wild-looking, shading the streets and parks, fed by the mountain rivers and streams that race through the city.