by Roger Deakin
We passed through an orchard of Star Crimson and Janatan apples, the latter a version of the American Jonathan. In other orchards they were growing varieties with names like Reinette Simerenko and Kandil Almatinsky to see how they would thrive at this altitude. Zakir and his foresters had planted 89 different kinds of apple tree here and found that only 17 of them did well. Wandering through plantations of apricot, almond, pear and poplar, we came to a field planted out with rows of three-foot walnut saplings raised from seed, all labelled with the names of the 288 varieties Zakir and his colleagues had identified. The genetic variations were enormous. We saw tiny, precocious trees they call ‘fast fruit’ that were already bearing fully fledged walnuts at the age of three. Others took seventeen years before bearing fruit, as they tend to do in England. Zakir proudly showed us his invention for raising seedling walnuts that allows them to be transplanted without damage to their roots. Walnuts, when they germinate, put down remarkably long tap roots, which are susceptible to damage by transplanting. Zakir’s idea was to sow the walnuts in a deep bed of compost in a concrete tank four feet deep. Once the saplings have put down roots and are ready for planting out, he floods the tank, turning the compost into a liquid slurry, and gently lifts out the little trees with roots intact.
While we examined the walnut nursery, Gena had been busy vegetable poaching in a nearby field and reappeared back at the lodge with an armful of corn-cobs for dinner. I helped him gather firewood and light the fire under the kazan, which he placed on a ledge carved out specially in the clay bank. We made the fire in the hollow beneath it, and Gena sliced up onions, garlic, potato and cabbage to make a stew. We spread out rugs and cushions in the orchard beside the millstream as it grew dark and watched the stars come out, very clear and apparently close in the mountain air. We lay listening to the water and the sounds of cooking inside the kazan. Flames leapt and cupped themselves around it in the dark. ‘We call tomorrow Jura, Uzbeki for Friendship Day,’ said Zakir. ‘Sundays are when men get together and go out to the countryside and cook on an open camp fire, talk and drink tea all day long. We air our domestic problems, talk politics, put the world to rights and cook some more. Then we go home again to our families.’ I thought of the English equivalent: going fishing, or up to the allotment. Gena brought the bubbling kazan, and we ladled out plates of vegetable stew. In another part of the orchard, a circle of students sat round their fire and sang to a dombra. ‘This is a new era for our trees,’ Zakir said. ‘The older foresters were all trained in Russia, growing firs and pines, so they got used to planting trees close together. Then they came back and did the same thing with walnuts in Kyrgyzstan, so we got a whole generation of tall, straight trees with hardly any fruit on them. They all had to be thinned out, of course. If there’s one thing a walnut can’t stand, it’s too much competition. They need plenty of light.’ Lounging on our cushions like Romans, we nibbled the corn-cobs Gena had roasted over the fire and munched fresh Star Crimson apples. We tracked a satellite across the sky and noted the irony of Kyrgyzstan’s poverty when it is so rich in all the things the world so longs for: clean air, clear mountain water and wild, organic fruit. That all the fruit here is exceptionally tasty was noted by the Australians, who have taken scions from Kyrgyz apples to propagate and cross-fertilize with their own. Gena felt the Ferghana Valley people were open to exploitation by the Turkish traders, who come to buy walnuts and under-pay the women to shell or husk them. Zakir complained that too many animals were allowed to roam the forest, preventing its natural regeneration with their browsing. Zamira was already half asleep. The owls began calling up and down the valley. Entirely sober, deeply contented, we stumbled off to our bunks.
Next morning, after a good steaming in the wood-fired sauna, we breakfasted on kasha, rice pudding, yoghurt, bread and honey from the next-door farmer. It was superb honey. It tasted of lemons, nuts, thyme, wild roses and maple. We reclined splendidly cushioned in the shade of the orchard again. Bees came in their dozens and settled around the honey bowl on our picnic tablecloth, wandering about its rim, feasting and gorging themselves. And why shouldn’t they? It was the fruit of their own labour and they were simply claiming back stolen property. As if in acknowledgement of this, nobody minded a bit, and we were soon surrounded by the little gatecrashers to our petit déjeuner sur l’herbe: big, chunky, striped hive bees that knew the meaning of hard work. They are so industrious up here that the beekeepers harvest honey from the hive three times a year, in May, July and late August or September. The Kyrgyzi call them ary. Once gorged, they went staggering unsteadily about our breakfast things, occasionally tumbling sideways as they taxied for take-off. Gena brewed tea on the mud-hearth fire and we prepared to set off.
Fording the Shaydansay River again, we bumped, swayed and teetered our way higher up the valley to over 6,000 feet, then walked along the river to a grove of ancient Tien Shan birch and Turkestan maple trees that formed a gateway to an alpine meadow with a sacred spring at its centre. Standing beside the spring was a wishing tree, an old hawthorn, Crataegus turkestanica, a tattered thing, decorated with hundreds of ribbons, shreds of bleached, coloured cloth, even a tiny prayer, rolled tightly in a scroll and hung by cotton on a branch. Thorns are important medicine trees in Kyrgyzstan. The berries or flowers are made into a tea to alleviate heart disease. A big walnut trunk had been hollowed into a drinking trough beside the spout of mountain water. The place was so remote, it seemed surprising that anyone would ever come here, let alone so many.
Once again I had the curious sensation of being in a place that felt very much like home, and yet it was full of trees and plants that were all subtly different from those I knew in England. There were birches, but they weren’t tall, slender and silver-barked. The birches that grew near the river were thick-set, ancient things whose trunks burst out in warty boles. This was Betula turkestanica, and many of these trees could be a hundred years old, said Zakir. We often found ourselves conversing in Latin: our common language was plants and trees, and their Linnaean names. Everything at this altitude grew very slowly, so even quite modest-looking bushes and trees were much older than they appeared. The valley walls and the open wood pasture we walked through were full of wild cherries, dog-roses, the Kyrgyz wild apple, cotoneaster bushes, wild Sogdian plum trees and berberis, whose seven or eight different varieties provide an important crop of wild berries, traditionally consumed by the Kyrgyz people for their high content of Vitamin C. The sharp-tasting black berries make a very good jam, and Uzbeks like to add them to their cooking. Zakir reckoned the honeysuckle that clambered up the trees on prodigious, sinewy trunks, Lonicera tianschanica, was probably over a hundred years old too, and some of the weather-beaten trees of thorn and juniper could have been clinging to the ledges along the valley walls, inching themselves up, for 400 years.
A pair of black eagles cruised high above us up the valley, towards the snowy tops of the Ferghana range with its great peaks, Babash-Ata, Alyysh-Tau and Chichekty-Tau, sheltering the valley from the cold northern airstreams. The Ferghana Valley is also protected from the hot Afghan air to the south by the Alai Gorge and the Pamir Mountains, and from the dry winds off the Mongolian deserts by the Alaykuu range. The high Chaktal and Atoinok ranges complete the horseshoe that creates a benign microclimate of moderate summer temperatures, mild winters, plenty of rainfall in spring and short bursts of it in early summer. This provides the walnuts, and the extraordinary variety of plant species associated with them in the fruit forests, with the ideal conditions of life. The unusually rich vegetation contains no fewer than 183 different trees and shrubs, including 51 species of wild rose.
As we climbed higher up the valley, and clambered up its steep wall, Zakir pointed out how the trees grew naturally in distinct bands according to altitude: walnuts further down the valley, Turkestan birch and maple by the river banks higher up, wild roses, honeysuckle and berberis on the valley floor and its margins along the rising walls. We climbed up through tangled woods of thorn tr
ees and wild apples, and emerged into a higher zone of junipers. Three different species grow on the mountainsides. In the massive, furrowed fork of one old tree, and among its roots under its dark canopy, we stumbled across a children’s den: a bunch of found horseshoes tied on to a branch, a pair of tattered grown-up ladies’ shoes, a little empty wooden box with its lid open, two rust-pocked white enamel bowls and a bit of tin for a wall. This tree, a Turkestan juniper, would be at least 400 years old, Zakir thought. Around 8,500 feet, even the junipers cease to grow, although in some slightly more sheltered places they even reach up to 10,000 feet.
The sun felt relentless up here, and, as we rounded a big rock, a pair of tawny snakes moved out of our path. ‘Kulvar,’ whispered Zakir in Uzbek as they slid off. We were climbing up to take a look at two enormous old walnuts standing either side of a spring. Zakir said people called the trees ‘diviners’ because they are always a sign of water, especially in otherwise arid places. A little covey of partridges, keklik, shot up and wittered across the valley.
After a picnic lunch in the orchard, with more honey, and more bees, we set off in the jeep along a dirt road through the forest for the village of Arslanbob. The walnut woods were full of the sound of singing, harvesters calling to each other, the sibilant rustling of shaken trees and hailstorms of falling nuts. Every so often we would catch a glimpse of a little encampment in the trees, or the Indian rope trick of smoke from a campfire. Deep in the woods, we encountered a battered, dusty Russian Army lorry parked up in a clearing with a range of household goods on display in the open back. It was nothing less than a mobile woodland shop, selling food and drink, soap, vodka, ironmongery, rugs and fabrics. You had the choice of paying in som or walnuts, and I discovered that walnuts were generally accepted everywhere in the forest as legal tender. Now and again huge trucks like this came ploughing along the dirt road in storms of dust, with standing room only behind the cab, passengers clinging on wherever they could, like ants on a leaf in a gale.
At Uzbek Gava, a quiet village full of lush apple orchards and ripe, rosy fruit, the dusty, orange road became a holloway so deeply tunnelled that the knotted roots of the mighty walnuts either side of it were exposed like the innards of some grotesque creature from a bestiary. The root systems of these trees have the same complex, wandering habit as their branches and must create all manner of crypts, vaults and subterranean mazes for the creatures that live beneath the forest floor. At the next village, Sharap, we had climbed to 5,600 feet. Someone had been digging the crimson clay out of a cliff face to make mud bricks, which, like blushing loaves, lay drying in the sun beside the poplar frame of a barn or farmhouse under construction.
We paused in a meadow that rose to pure apple woods of Malus kyrgyzorum and collected fruit and pips. By now Gena and Zamira were adept at eating an apple and retaining the pips in their mouths. Every now and again they solemnly presented me with a precious regurgitated handful to be stored and labelled in a paper bag or envelope. Some of the wild Kyrgyz apple trees around these dusty hills stood alone, twenty or thirty feet tall, in meadows beside the road and were magnificent specimens still bearing plenty of the festive, bright-red fruit, which we found sweet, tangy and overflowing with juice. Gena brought down the topmost fruit in the traditional way, by throwing sticks. Zakir, who is in charge of the forests of southern Kyrgyzstan, turned a blind eye.
At Arslanbob, right under the imposing snowy heights of Babash-Ata, we stayed in the outlying farmhouse of Safora and her daughter Erissida. They swung open a farm gate built like a portcullis to let us in to the walled yard and welcomed us with the now familiar Kyrgyz version of the cream tea: fresh wet walnuts, airan or kefir, the farm’s yoghurt, nan, more walnuts in syrup, apples, buns, fresh cream and chai. The two women immediately made us feel at home. Our tea-time conversation centred on walnuts as brain food. We all agreed that since the shelled kernel looks like a brain, the principle of sympathetic magic would indicate that it must be good for brains. That, at any rate, was what all the woodland folk in the walnut forest believed. Zakir said the Romans wouldn’t allow their slaves to eat walnuts in case they grew too clever. Gena said, ‘If I eat enough walnuts, perhaps I could become a doctor of science like you.’ Zakir explained how the humus from falling walnut leaves helps foster other plants. But photosynthesis in the living leaves produces an ether called juglone, which evaporates into the air on warm days and can affect your brain, so you shouldn’t sleep under a walnut tree by day. Because it is a mild organic pesticide, many insects tend to avoid walnuts. Zakir said this is one reason for planting them in the yards of farmhouses: horses can stand in their shade, less bothered by flies. Gena added that people sometimes rub the leaves on their faces to keep off flies, but I couldn’t decide if he was serious or just wanted to see us all blackening our faces with walnut leaves.
Later, after dinner of chicken broth with noodles, Erissida gave me a big towel, and I went across the yard to take a sauna. Every household seemed to have a wood-fired sauna and took the business of bathing very seriously. I followed a garden path past the cowshed towards a column of woodsmoke; this was issuing from under the Chinaman’s hat atop the stack of a simple tin-roofed structure with thick walls of insulating cob. You went first into a narrow ante-chamber, with just a bench, duck-boarded floor and a row of wooden pegs along the wall. I climbed out of my dusty clothes and opened a second well-insulated door into the torrid semi-darkness of the inner sanctum, a room of six or seven feet by ten, with just enough headroom under the close-boarded ceiling. A single electric lightbulb in the changing room shone through a strip of misted window and reflected off the whitewashed cob walls. The semi-darkness only heightened the atmosphere of sanctity. In one corner stood a milk churn full of cold water. To the right, a wood-fired boiler, fed through a steel door in the changing room, wheezed and popped with a recent ration of split logs. Directly on top of the boiler was a steaming tank of hot water, topless, like me, and next to it a steel drum full of hot stones. The stove was a lanky contraption with two chimney pipes, one running up through the stones, the other through the hot-water tank. The two pipes then joined in a welded confluence into a single pipe issuing through the roof towards the ozone layer. It was like being in an engine room. Before me along the back wall a big enamel bowl stood on a long, low wooden table. Beside it were two large enamel mugs for use as ladles and a hosepipe with a tap. A second bowl contained pale-green water steeped with bunches of mint, which I flicked on to the hissing stones. A delicious mint-tea pungency began to fill the sauna. I was soon sweating, partly from the heat and partly from filling up bowls, topping up the milk churn and ladling cold water over my body to prevent it melting. I worked at it like a stoker on the footplate of a steam engine and resolved one day to build myself a wood-fired sauna, even making a few soggy drawings of the plan and elevation.
I was woken by a chorus of the massed donkeys of Arslanbob with descants by the cockerel in the yard. It was another still, sunny day. After a feast of pancakes and honey, Safora gave me the recipe for preserving walnuts in syrup as we sat outside the front porch in the shade of the farm’s big walnut tree. You must pick your walnuts while they are still green and soft, before the shells have begun to form. First, you perforate them with a fork and soak them in brine for twelve hours. You then wash them several times to take away the salt. Finally, you boil the walnuts in water with enough added sugar to make syrup. The longer you boil, the thicker and more delicious the black syrup.
At the other end of the yard stood two old Russian lorries, one of which bore the legend Animal Wild painted in big letters on its side and a cut-out picture of a tiger on its radiator. Erissida said it belonged to her neighbour Mansur, a Tartar woodturner and beekeeper. He used the lorries to carry his hives about the country in springtime, in pursuit of wild flowers and blossom. I imagined him as a modern Giles Winterbourne, perfectly in tune with his beloved bees, as Winterbourne was with his trees, roving the wood pastures and alpine meadows in search
of early tulips, wild roses and apple blossom behind the wheel of Animal Wild.
Thirty or forty crows circled up on a thermal as Zakir, Zamira and I began walking up Babash-Ata through the foothills. Gena had gone to buy food and prepare it for our return. Mountain water raced all about us, irrigating a system of small fields of potatoes, onions and maize separated by low walls of stones picked from the land. The air cooled as we climbed, and the trees began to vary like goods on the ascending floors of a department store. First we passed wild cherries, then tough-looking elms, karagach in Kyrgyz, Ulmus ulmifolia in Latin. Higher up, we reached Turkestan maples, Acer turkestanica, old trees like smaller-scale English planes, surviving on almost bare rock. At 7,500 feet, halfway up the mountain, we found ourselves on a sudden high plateau and stepped on to a desert of pale, silver stones. A single magnificent tree stood at the shimmering centre of what must once have been a glacier. It was a walnut, the finest I had ever seen, and in its deep shade lay a whole flock of some 200 sheep.
As we walked over to meet the tree, three figures separated themselves from the shadowed flock and advanced over the unsteadying pebbles. For a moment there was a hint of High Noon about the scene, but we exchanged greetings and shook hands. They offered us tea with their grandfather, nodding towards a camp on the hillside half hidden in the shade of some rocks. Not wishing to disturb the sheep from its shadow, I viewed the walnut from a respectful distance. Its roots must have located a spring, for in the midst of nothing but barren stones it rose some fifty feet into an immense crown of dense leaves. Its great trunk, which must have measured at least twelve to fourteen feet in girth, had been polished smooth by sheep and lanolin. Walnuts, said Zakir, need moisture in the air around them as well as in the soil, which is why they have been thriving for millions of years in the uniquely humid microclimate of the Ferghana Valley. I wondered again how it is that trees are able to feel their way towards water, even when their roots have to travel some distance to reach it. By what process do they sense its nearness? Those little hairs on roots, which do all the work of absorbing water, may just be antennae of a kind.