Wolves & Honey
Page 7
The Station began as a place where chemicals were developed and monitored to improve food production. Its work had its origins in the birth of chemistry as an academic discipline a hundred and fifty years ago, in the “agricultural chemistry” of Justus von Liebig’s Organic Chemistry and Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology.
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Walt Whitman took the unusual phrase Leaves of Grass from Liebig’s writings. Abraham Lincoln studied Liebig and envisioned a nation of small family farms, operated without slave labor by educated farmers who could add chemical fertilizer to their land to dramatically increase the yield of crops.
The first scientist appointed to lead Lincoln’s newly created Department of Agriculture, in 1862, was Liebig’s student Charles Wetherill. The New York State Agricultural Experiment Station was established in Geneva two decades later. At the corner of Castle Street above the Station land stood a farmhouse in the shape of an octagon, like a seal representing the geometric harmony of the molecular underlay of Liebig’s agricultural chemistry.
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“Agricultural chemistry” was redundant. Chem meant agricultural land. It was the hieroglyph for Egypt. Chem was the black land, as opposed to the barren red land of the desert, the rich arable soil left by the receding waters of the Nile flood, where agriculture and its necessary contingent mathematics—counting, the essential instrument of prediction—began.
The blackness was the raw soil itself, the wet black mud oozing out of the receding flood as the air all around rang with the cries of water birds—pelicans, herons, flamingos, the snowy egret on its luminous wings—wheeling down to feed on the myriad stranded living things. The sacred ibis was the most spectacular—a bird hunted out of the papyrus swamps a hundred years ago for purple hat plumes (though I saw one once, in Khartoum, along the river from under the mahogany trees, among the leaves like clusters of pale green grapes, a brilliant purple bird blotched with white slowly spinning down onto the mud flats of the White Nile to feed).
In dynastic Egypt hunting the sacred ibis was punishable with death. The bird was the god Thoth, who invented letters and numbers, and is always shown with a pen and a notepad in his hand. What the bird signified in that desert country was critical to know: when the water would come, and when it would go, and what the configuration of the stars would be at these pivotal times. To know these things one would have to see patterns, and create patterns—to measure, with absolute precision, distance, quantity, and time.
Mathematics, measurement, chemistry, emerged from the chaos of a wetland that mirrored the profound order of the stars. In this wetland a water lily was the notation for a thousand; a tadpole, a hundred thousand; and the frog, Hecate, the sound of the night itself— hecate hecate hecate, the mark meaning to repeat, to double the quantity again and again.
Thoth passed through the ages as Hermes Trismegistos (“thrice great,” a standard hieroglyphic epithet: three water birds walking together in a line). Alchemy, “the Egyptian thing,” arose from the attempt to recover the heretical knowledge of measurement and proportion that was lost in antiquity.
Pythagoras established a religion along the lines of the hieratic discipline of mathematics that he learned in Egypt: everything reduces to the eternal truth of mathematical formulae, an ethereal realm of pure form. His followers Democritus and Plato understood atomic theory in much the modern sense. Their notion that the universe is composed of an infinite number of radiant particles combining into patterns in a predictable flow of movement one might imagine arising from the infinite number of patterned stars flowing across the sky. The theory fell out of favor for two thousand years because Aristotle did not agree with it. The name coined for the indivisible, ultimate nature of matter was a-tom, “that which cannot be cut up,” for everything else could be broken down into invisible particles that arranged themselves with geometrical harmony and precision into all the different forms of life.
The visionary recluse Lucretius urged his readers not to be blinded by religion (not to be “tied up”—the literal meaning of the Latin word religio) but to see with their own eyes the world that is before them and not to fear death, for all matter is composed of radiant indestructible particles called atoms that combine, come apart, and recombine. The Nature of Things begins with an invocation to the creative principle of the whole earth and the richness of the soil itself, the sweetness of sexual love:
Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
Concelebras—per te quoniam genus amne animantum
Concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis—
Te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubile caeli
Adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
Summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti
Placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum,
am simul ac species patefactast verna diei
Et reserata viget genitablilis aura Favoni,
Aerieae primum volucris te, diva, tuumque
Significant initum, perculsae corda tua vi;
Inde ferae pecudes persultant pabula laeta
Et rapidos tranant amnis (ita capta lepore
Te sequitur cupide quo quamque inducere pergis);
Deinque per maria ac montis fluviousque rapacis
Frondiferasque domos avium camposque virentis,
Omnibus incutiens blandum per pectora amorem,
Efficis ut cupide generatim saecla propagent.
Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernan
Nec sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras
Exoritur neque fit laetum neque amabile quicquam,
Te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse,
Quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor.
All-nourishing Venus, beneath the sliding signs of the sky, everything that lives in the ship-bearing sea and the fruit-bearing earth you yourself fill with life—for through you alone every race of living things is conceived and sees the light of the rising sun. For you, Goddess, the winds leave the cloudy sky and the endlessly varied earth puts forth sweet flowers, the waves of the pacified ocean shine with a soft light. For as soon as the face of spring appears and restoring breezes of the gende south wind begin to stir, the birds of the air first signal your coming, struck through the heart by your force. Then the wild flocks run over the rich earth, and cross fast-flowing streams, captured by your charm they follow you wild with the desire to procreate. Then through seas and mountains and rapid rivers and the leaf-bearing homes of birds and the rich green fields, all things are pierced with the sweetness of love in their hearts, and through desire propagate their species generation after generation. Since you alone govern the nature of things, nor without you does anything arise within the shores of light, nor is anything lovely or beautiful made, I will endeavor to write these verses to you, in which I will attempt to paint the nature of things.
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There is a garden at the edge of the world, in the rim of gold where the sun sets:
Hespera panta pheron osa phainolis eskedas auws
(Hespera brings back all that the bright dawn scattered)
Sappho is said to mean Hespera as Venus here, the evening star, but I have always thought she used the word to mean evening itself, the light thickening to gold on the far horizon.
In the garden of the Hesperides, the children of the evening sky, there are apples made of gold. Though this too is unclear, for melon, the Greek word for apple, or, more generally, fruit, is also the word for sheep. Flocks and fruit-bearing trees in the Greek world were gold. They were wealth itself. When Hercules slew the guardian snake in the garden of the Hesperides, did he steal apples or sheep, or clouds dissolving in the sun?
What is an apple? And where did it come from? How can one trace its trajectory west to the orchards of the Seneca Indians, of the spiritualist William Smith, of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station?
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In another story seeds of gold are
carried in a leather pouch across the world as a gift to the poor: corn, the seeds of a hybridized giant grass from an isolated valley in Mexico, traveled north and east across the North American continent, to the Algonquin and the Iroquois, and from them on to Europe, Africa, India, and China in a known and traceable route. The apple was traveling in the opposite direction at the same time, but its path is a mystery.
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The flowering branch appears as an image all along the network of ancient trade routes through China and Persia, in the quick black strokes of early Zen painting, and in the rich, exquisite colors of the ateliers of Safavid Afghanistan, following the lemons, pomegranates, peaches, and pears that traveled west on the Silk Road. The branch was the magic wand: the clone.
The technique of grafting is older than history. It occurs in nature when the wind rubs the branches of different trees together and the raw sap seals the wood. Grafting can reproduce a fruit precisely without the random mess of biological reproduction, which always creates something new. It is a form of miraculous asexual reproduction that has long been associated with monasticism—as in China, where temple complexes kept enclosed orchards and meticulously preserved unusual, sacred trees, like the fossil gingko.
An old friend of mine who has worked in the Sinai desert for years told me that he had seen the nomads there graft domestic apples and pears onto the native drought-resistant hawthorns. They learned the practice from the monks, they said, who carried baskets of earth up to the level inner valley floors of the red granite massif of Mount Sinai, and planted fields of wheat around the hermitages they made out of piled pink stones. The monks planted trees a thousand years ago that remain alive today beside their long-abandoned mountain chapels. The nomads tend the remnants of their hidden orchards high up on the mountain. They practice grafting by wedging the flowering branch of a domestic tree onto a native root stock and packing it in place with mud.
The Roman army grafted apples onto the wild flowering crabs in Britain in much the same way. Might not experienced cultivators like the Iroquois have introduced European apples into western New York with this practice, I asked the pomologist at the Experiment Station, or did they simply grow seedling trees? Champlain wrote of Iroquois apple orchards growing beside the corn along the St. Lawrence in the early 1600s—suggesting that apple seeds were taken up by these experienced cultivators within years of the first European contact.
Were remnant Seneca trees absorbed into the Station’s early experimental orchards and hybridized into the multiple commercial American varieties developed by the Station in the twentieth century?
A photograph in The Apples of New York State, published by the Station in 1905, shows a battered old Seneca tree on Station land. The photograph was used to illustrate the radical change that the cultivation of apples in America underwent in the nineteenth century, expedited and defined by William Smith’s commercial enterprise, and later by the Experiment Station itself: the mass standardization of apple trees by grafting.
An apple tree that grows from a seed is the result of the random pollination of bees bringing pollen from a different tree that the bee was drawn to by its random location and incidental qualities of beauty. Perhaps fellow bees led others to a certain tree, or perhaps a single flower was a new discovery by a single bee from a certain hive. Hence every blossom of every apple tree is fertilized by pollen brought in a minuscule and inadvertent way on the legs of individual, individually driven bees. The process can be broken down to include even the blossoms themselves, which in every detail—the platform on which the bee might be drawn to land, the arrangement of the petals that conceal and expose the genetic material so that it will seduce the insect and accidentally be perpetuated—contribute to this process. The color draws the bees, as does the beauty of the shape and smell, each involved in flagging random bees from the sky. The fertilization of every apple blossom involves a number of different factors, and every fertilization is different, meaning that every seed is a new creation entirely, and the seed that falls from the apple that falls from a certain tree takes a new form as a different tree, a seedling with a randomness that reflects the randomness of all life.
Commercial grafting put an end to this. The grafted fruit is an artificial creation that must be maintained as such by human hands, though the formation of the fruit itself, even on the controlled varieties of grafted trees, remains dependent on the random visits of bees.
Thoreau wrote “Wild Apples” as he watched in alarm the rapidly developing process of mass grafting, of the standardization of the apple. He wrote of apples that taste like themselves, that are always different—that one ate, feeling their bitterness and sweetness at once, in a cold November wind, under the tree itself. “The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them . . . But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from recent experience, such ravages have been made!” Of the wild apples—whether the native crab or seedling trees from European cultivars, “I have seen no account of these in the Fruit and Fruit Trees of America, though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted kinds. Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their . . . flavor as for their mildness, their size . . . not so much for their beauty. Indeed I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen . . . No,” Thoreau concludes, “bring me an apple from the tree of life!”
Everyone remembered that Dick Wellington, Dr. Glass’s uncle, had taken an interest in the Indian trees. He had formed such a large collection of Seneca artifacts from the Station fields that they became the basis for archeological work there shortly after his death in the mid-1970s. Wellington had come to the Station in the early part of the twentieth century, and became one of the foremost apple breeders in the world, inventing the Cortland, the Macoun, and the Jonagold, among dozens of other varieties. FDR sent his daughter, Anna, to Geneva to work as his assistant in the 1930s, to learn about American apple trees. I remember Wellington at a picnic shortly before he died in Geneva. I thought, This is how I want to be at the end of my life, white-haired, red-cheeked, with a radiant intelligence evident in clear bright eyes.
The pomologist who replaced Wellington at the Station remembered that the day he arrived, in 1949, Wellington had taken him to see one of the old Seneca trees, where “it stood behind a shed on the corner of North Street and the Preemption Road.” Would not Wellington, I asked him, who had such an interest in the Indian presence there, have developed grafts from the Seneca trees? And the native American apple—the wild flowering crab, native not only to North America but specifically to the Finger Lakes region—would not Wellington have tried somehow to draw in and perpetuate its qualities?
But no one knew or seemed interested in the answers to these questions about the native trees of the Finger Lakes. The local quality, the regional link, had been lost in the larger picture of the development of a homogeneous salable product.
The pomologist at the Station in the line of Dick Wellington now is Phil Forsline, a remarkably kind man with the patience and generosity of a schoolteacher, who will, if you can catch him, take you through the Station’s orchards, now called “the largest apple gene bank in the world,” and show you every tree. He has a shelf for the many books that have mentioned his work in recent years. The problem Forsline is trying to solve is a purely practical one: how to expand the gene pool of the commercial grafted apple, the many varieties of which have all been developed from two or three parent strains. The gene pool is so shallow that the entire species would be threatened by the development of a single resistant strain of disease. Hence Forsline, with Barry Juniper at Oxford, has a particular interest in the discovery of the origin of the apple in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kazakhstan by the Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who published, in 1926, a monograph called “The Problem of the Origin of Fruit Trees.”
Vavilov spent years traveling around the world tracking down the native habitats of domesticated plants, and had traced the parent of the cul
tivated apple to a remnant patch of virgin forest in the Tien Shan. These were descendants of trees that had been protected in the folds of the mountains from Pleistocene glaciation and had been preserved and developed over the ages by the birds that ate their fruit. The seeds of the fallen fruit were carried down from the mountains by wandering bears.
Thus bears were responsible for the development of the apple tree and its sweetness, for the original trees produced fruit that was both sweet and bitter, and bears would eat only the sweetest fruit, and would carry and spread its seeds down from the mountains and west to the plains over millennia.
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I was in the Tien Shan Mountains once, the forest from which apples and gold had come, as the accidental guest of an old Kazakh archaeologist named Beken. He had been involved in the discovery of the 2,500-year-old Sakia mummy called “Gold Man,” a body found in scarlet clothing, plated all over with gold:
The entire coat was covered with sewn-on buckles in the form of trefoils and tigers’ heads . . . the buckles were cut out of gold foil and sewn or glued onto the red suede as appliqué work. Their rhythmical alternation against the red background of the coat and thigh boots created an openwork effect. The headgear was decorated with buckles in the shape of leopards, tigers, sculpted figures of horned and winged horses, birds, an ibex on the top of the hat, and plaques depicting a mountain with the “tree of life,” others in the form of birds’ wings.
(K. Akishev, The Ancient Gold of Kazakhstan)
Here was the tree of life on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, in the green lower reaches of snow-capped mountains, above dry gravel courses of desert riverbeds lined with wild irises, and oases of white-trunked poplar trees and tiny round-topped Chinese elms filled with lilac rollers and kingfishers the color of lapis lazuli.