My last apple tree is shaming me again. It is producing huge quantities of fruit. And I am throwing its gifts away. Twisted, much-lopped, and so unbalanced that it is amazing that it stays up, it is almost the lone survivor from the Victorian orchards which were grubbed up, in the Age of Appeasement, to make way for the building of my suburban street.
I have no idea what kind of apple it so generously provides. The globes, as they ripen, blush with a lovely shade of red. They are, in fact, glorious. If only they tasted as good as they look, but they are tart and sour, some sort of cooker. The birds love to peck them, and they bruise at a touch. I would be kinder to the tree if it were only a Cox’s Orange Pippin, the greatest of the English eating apples, which has now almost disappeared. Here I will complain about this tragedy, largely because silly people insist to me that it has not happened. Before I went to live abroad in 1990, the Cox’s Orange Pippin was still easily found each year all over England. It was the embodiment of autumn. It had a special glow, a little like a sunset towards the end of October, viewed through the bare branches of a copse of trees, across clean, harvested fields. Its skin was rough to the touch, not waxily shiny like the supermarket fruit. It had some bite in it, and its sweetness was offset by its sharpness. But now there are smooth, bland, unsubtle, pulpy spheres sold under this name. Fools buy and eat them, and tell me they are the same, but they are not. Perhaps in some isolated pockets of unrationalized countryside, there is an Apple Resistance still growing the originals. But I have yet to make contact with them.
My tree bears something else entirely. If I were provident, I would identify its name (English apples have beautiful names), carefully pick and store its output for pies and tarts and crumbles and that underrated dish, cold stewed apples and cream. But I do not. I shamefully wait for its fruit to fall, and then I gather the split and squashy windfalls up and throw them away. From June onwards, with gathering intensity, they fall to the ground, endangering anyone beneath. If one of these landed upon your head, it could spoil your whole day. They could easily kill, say, a squirrel. I am sometimes woken after midnight when an especially large specimen decides to detach itself from its branch and bounce off the roof of one of my sheds before plopping onto the lawn below. The waste is appalling and, I suspect, sinful. These are the kindly fruits of the earth for which we give thanks. And I thanklessly waste them, year by year, like one of the stupid or misguided characters who lurk at the edges of the parables of Our Lord.
Apples do have special importance. In the damper countries they are the model of all fertility. The French and the Dutch call potatoes “Apples of the Earth,” a lovely phrase. In Italy and Russia, tomatoes are “Golden Apples” (some of the most delicious tomatoes I have ever eaten, bought from a Moscow market, had little golden flecks on their skin, which for the first time brought this expression to life for me). In our cool, squelchy country of meadows, bogs, moors, and low hills, we have no olive trees and precious few vines. The trees of life in the English landscape are apple trees.
If you are very fortunate, you will have heard a choir sing Elizabeth Poston’s beautiful setting of the eighteenth-century poem “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” with its opening verse
The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green:
The tree of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.
The verse is probably the work of an English country clergyman. The words emigrated to America soon after they were written, and were, I think, better known there than in England. But Miss Poston’s 1967 setting of it (done, I am always ashamed to think, during my most godless years, only a few miles from where I was then at school) has brought it home again. If you had ever thought that beauty in music had been abolished in the modern age, it will persuade you otherwise. The beauty is still there, if anyone wants to find it.
I am not sure what scriptural warrant there is for the apple tree as a symbol of Christ, but it is hard to question its rightness when you encounter it in music or art. Another striking example of this idea is not far from where I live, in the riverside village of Iffley, swallowed but not yet digested by the ever-expanding city of Oxford. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Iffley contains many ancient splendors, to be described perhaps another time. But it recently acquired that rare thing, a modern stained-glass window of great loveliness. The painter Roger Wagner learned the art of stained glass to complete this project. It shows the figure of Christ hanging from a tree, on the top of a green hill far away, but a tree which has exploded into a joyous cloud of apple blossom, and from whose roots flows a river of blessings, filled with fish, on whose banks seven sheep and one lamb graze. I suppose some people may not like it, on doctrinal grounds, but I have several times stood for long minutes in front of it, compelled into thought, as the clear north light pours through it.
Of course, the olive, the fig, and the grape are older and sharper symbols of life and love and fruitfulness. There is the Prophet Micah’s great promise that “they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid,” and the unequalled marriage blessing of the one hundred twenty-eighth Psalm, ordained to be read at the Church of England’s timelessly beautiful wedding service: “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine: upon the walls of thine house. Thy children like the olive-branches: round about thy table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed: that feareth the Lord.” The apple does not receive quite the same level of respect in Scripture, though it gets a favorable mention in the Song of Solomon: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste” and the more puzzling reference later on “Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.”
But of course we all now know now that the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, by the eating of which men might seek to be as gods, was not an apple. Or wasn’t it? H. G. Wells, in a rather engaging and witty short story of 1897, “The Apple”, imagined persuasively how such a fruit—remarkably like an apple as it happens—might have come into the hands of a student teacher called Mr. Hinchcliff during a banal train journey through Southern England. Poor Mr. Hinchcliff, afraid to eat the fruit and embarrassed to be seen carrying it about, eventually hurls it over the wall . . . into an orchard.
