Crunch, by Jemma Neville

CRUNCH

- on tender care in a time of crisis

I bought the apple tree on a whim one day early in June. Pleasures shouldn’t be over-considered. And what greater pleasure, or original sin, is there for a woman than picking a juicy apple on a whim?

I chose it from the middle aisle of a budget supermarket in my old neighbourhood. A gift from a past life to future me from present me, because trees are, among other things, living time-capsules.

I was on my way home from a chanced lunch and gossip in a nearby café with a friend, which is the sort of spontaneous thing that rarely happens to the working mothers of small children who live out of town. And happenstance provokes the kind of joy that makes the best of all possible worlds seem within touching, or picking, distance.

I was attracted to the tree’s name, summerred, which I misread as a verb and not two, conjoined adjectives. I was therefore sold on living within a mid-summer’s daydream, filled with abundant light and potential. Being Scottish and in need of some rays, the name had me at hello.

The malus domestica summerred was small but perfectly formed, its glossy leaves shaped like the Turkish-eye charms that dangle on strings from the cashiers of corner shops in the old neighbourhood - each whirling in the gust of a breeze as though a dervish. My tree would be a living, green amulet to keep away bad things. Domestica, it said. Homely, I read. Welcoming.

I upended the apple sapling from the confines of a plastic pot, ready to be tucked into its new nursery bed. Then by a spade and watering can, I paced out steps among the tall grasses and shells of our scrubby plot by the sea, murmuring aloud the names of familiar plants as though a roll-call: alchemilla mollis, aubretia, campion, meadowsweet… I considered where would be best suited to sustain life. Just enough sunlight. Not too much of a north-easterly wind. Just enough shade. Not too much waterlogging. Just right.

The microclimate of this stretch of coast is in flux like those in the world at large. Each year, our summers are hotter, the winters wetter. Overflow from the surrounding fields has created a burn in spate. And mud. Everywhere, mud. Wildfires are breaking out in the Galloway Forest Park, in the Cairngorms and on Arthur’s Seat in central Edinburgh. The first, confused tulips bud in February. The lilac flowers in April and then shrivels with a late frost. Mediterranean plants like santolina and fennel are thriving where sweet peas and roses appear windblown and thirsty by August. We need to learn to plant differently in a time of unknowing.

Time comes at you fast as a parent. Mothers, in particular, are the watchwomen of earliest memories - we store, grow and dig up memories afresh for the babies that will become toddlers that will become children who need narrative to make sense of the world. All the time in the world it seems like when you are little. And so give the story a happy beginning, if you don’t get to know the rest.

I peel back the years and remember books from my own childhood that came with alternative narratives. Turn to the next page if you want Little Red Riding Hood to meet the big bad wolf, or turn to page ten if you prefer, instead, that she delivers the basket of apples to her other grandmother, the one who lives in a city far from the woods. I would choose the big bad wolf, of course, but later and alone, have a sneaky flick through to see what I had missed. Now, fully grown, I hover again with one foot in the woods and one in the city, both character and narrator.

My four-year-old daughter explores life at her own pace. In her season of incessant but why? questioning, she is a dreamer who feels no urgency. She approaches me with her fists clenched and outstretched. When I enquire, hesitantly, as to the contents, she smiles and straightens her fingers to release two captive bumble bees, one from each hand. They soar and loop in the warm air with their own dizzy, buzzy-bee-ing purpose.

Miraculously, it seems to me, my girl is un-stung. She is like a Hells Angels biker with love-hate tattooed onto her knuckles, whispering softly to the winged creatures within to prepare themselves for flight. And they do, fly on, to freely pollinate apple blossom so that we may get pips chiming in the autumn. Here are the birds and the bees, with my fantastical daughter - who contained in the womb all of the pips, or eggs, she will ever release, and those of her own daughter and granddaughter. I may not live to see the fruits of that human labour but we will be connected by our very cores. How to explain any of this to a four-year-old? I encourage her to take all the bites out of life that she can.

Onto a doorframe, I draw horizontal pencil marks of the children' s heights and dates as they take it in turn to stand tall and press their heels against the wood panelling. The marks are in pencil not pen because we will move one day and have to freshen things up for selling. Relocate, upsize, downsize, or move to where jobs and schools and dreams and ageing parents take us next in life. Up sticks. The term comes from the days when families were nomadic and travelled from one place to another in search of work or good grazing land for animals. A home was a structure of sticks that could be moved and reassembled place to place. And in between places, small apples grew wild and entangled in the hedgerows of common ground for all to pick.

Modern varieties of apple are the cousins of these crab-apple trees, the indigenous members of the rose family, rosacea, alongside hawthorn, rowan and wild pears. This kinship of plants has thorns which develop from the spurs on branches and blossom with five petals and five sepals. Hence, a rose by any other name.

The original crab-apple roses produced tiny, tart-tasting fruit which hung in small bunches low to the ground. This sour crop is called pome, from the Norman French spelling of pomme, an apple. And it was from France, via the Norman Conquest, that sweet, hybrid varieties with their greater fruit-yielding properties were introduced to Britain for agriculture.

By the eighteenth century, as the commons were being enclosed for industrial labour, or forced emigration, the private gardens of the wealthy and powerful were laid out in geometrical rows with trees trimmed into elaborate topiary. Nature was imagined as something unruly in need of control.

It was against the excesses of the French court at the gardens of Versailles that Voltaire wrote his famous polemic Candide. In 1759 - so the story goes - three weary travellers – Candide, Pangloss and Cacambo – arrive at the outskirts of Constantinople and meet an old man sat beneath the boughs of an orange tree. The stranger invites them to join him on the ground and share some fruit, for he has grown just enough, and no more, to share with his family, neighbours and guests. The travellers tell him about the relentless pain, bloodshed and despair they have experienced on their brutal journey across the world. On their travels, they witnessed the Lisbon Earthquake and tsunami of 1755, the starvation that ensued, despotic rulers, sexual violence used as a weapon of war, torture, religious intolerance and the oppression of minorities leading to mass migration. The friends bemoan, how on Earth can this be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds?

The man with the oranges explains that he can do nothing to alleviate their suffering, or the many problems of the wider world. Rather, he grows fruit and, with close observation and tender care, looks after the land and the people that call the land home. The simple message, like the fruit, quenches the thirst of the travellers. They conclude: “we must return home to cultivate our garden”.

Today’s crisis of nature is also a crisis of power - who has power, who doesn’t, and who gets to decide how we live, eat, travel and govern. Ecological breakdown is a political choice, not just an industrial one. And political change only happens when people are willing to think differently about themselves, about one another, and about what might be possible.

Throughout history, apples have also come to represent possibility. In Greek mythology, the winning of a golden apple was believed to have been the source of Aphrodite’s beauty and fertility. Aphrodite, who was then portrayed by Renaissance painters as emerging from white sea foam upon a giant scallop shell, her long, auburn hair billowing around her. She commanded the tree of knowledge, of paradise.

Parādaijah in old Persian means a walled enclosure separating the cultivated from the uncultivated, knowledge from ignorance, light from dark. It denotes a green orchard filled with tree boughs extending north to follow the sun from spring through summer and autumn, and south to a desolate, wintry underworld. By implication, life without leaves is a hellish falling from grace and virtue.

Today, sat in my green garden, I hear a news bulletin on the radio announce that astronauts encircling the Moon are on their way back to Planet Earth. They have travelled further into Space than humans have ever journeyed before, sticks or no sticks, to the dark side of the Moon. The astronauts shared digital photos in realtime, captioned Hello, World. And so many photographs were taken by the excited spacemen and women that Mission Control had to issue instructions on how to clean the space shuttle windows using a special cloth. The windows were made grubby by many hands pressed against the glass taking selfies. More holiday boast than scientific discovery, one commentator remarked. The name of the spaceship was Artemis II. Artemis, the ancient Greek god believed to protect women and children from harm.

Meanwhile on Earth, news is also broadcast about a four-year-old girl in Lebanon, crushed to death by falling debris after an Israeli bomb on her home. If there is an ancient God, they did not protect this little girl from harm. I turn off the news. I want to remember the girl.

Those of us living in an alternative reality of peace and safety might speak of dying twice. Once physically, mortally. Then once again when no one left alive remembers you. This could be a span of five decades - two above and two below, therefore an arc of about one hundred and fifty years, or roughly that of a fruit-bearing tree.

I consider the possibilities - or the point - of a lone tree in Scotland against the darkness of humanitarian and ecological grief. I offer it water and a wooden stake for support. Pectin, amino-acids, fructose, minerals and vitamins combine. Ought I to perform a blessing, a wassailing of apples? Wassailing is a ceremony in which a toast of cider is poured onto the tree roots to honour our ancestors and bring about new life. I resolve to do so come the shift into autumn.

If humans can die twice in terms of living memory, might other creatures be born twice? Take butterflies, for example, so emblematic of seasonal change. They begin life as very hungry caterpillars before a metamorphosis or second-birth into a chrysalis through stages of mucus-encased pupae. Schmetterling, Germans call butterflies. Smatterling, I hear. S(matter). To shatter, or destroy something delicate and important. Or perhaps to scatter, like rose petals, or ashes.

As with humans, and birds, butterflies possess internal circadian clocks. The insect clocks are in their antennae and brain which allow them to both reach adult maturity and to navigate complex migration routes. They use the light of the sun as a flight compass. Seasonal variances in daylight hours also regulate the timing of their migration paths, south in autumn and north in spring for species in the northern hemisphere. The monarch butterfly is particularly famed for its journey down the Pacific coast from Canada to Mexico and back again - a route that can take months to complete, with individual butterflies travelling up to one hundred miles a day. Yet the full annual cycle is not completed by an individual butterfly, but rather an interconnected timespan of multiple generations born, reproducing and dying along the way. Flying on, falling back, passing on the baton of life and muscle memory. The stretched effort of the journey, if not the destination, is the collective graft.

My summer-red tree is now stretching its roots down and out. A tree purchased from a German supermarket, likely grown in a Dutch polytunnel, from a variety originating in France in the eighteenth century, from the seed of a wild species that grew in China and which was later dropped as apple cores by travellers, or planted, along the trade networks connecting Central Asia and Europe.

With good conditions, the little tree might live another century. Not much by tree standards when compared to the two to three thousand years of the Fortingall Yew, or 600 years typical for ancient oaks. I can hope for us to overlap for a few decades but in the natural way of things, the tree will outlive me.

The image on the label tag depicts a harvest of bright-red apples. It is a fire-engine red, the same colour as the woollen jumper that I am wearing - this is summer in Scotland after all. Red. The colour of alarms, of danger, of blood, of do not enter signs and crisis. But also, too, I think of patent-leather sandals on the first day of primary school, of the waxy solidity and confidence of a new lipstick, of a dollop of ketchup smothering a poke of chips, of my first bicycle – a cheery Raleigh with its name, Apple, inscribed onto the inner frame. Motherhood and apple pie, apple of my eye, Cider with Rosie, rosacea pips, the pips of a clock chime, a chime of wrens.

Because, summerred. Full of life itself. Stored up with more in waiting. Today, tomorrow, this year, and perhaps for the next few years, there won’t be fruit from the little, lone tree. This will take time. The tree will need others. It will need bees to transfer the pollen from one tree to another, worms to enrich the soil, spiders to eat the aphids and caterpillars that want to spoil the leaves, and birds to carry the seed, in the form of pips, to other trees in other places called home.

Maybe there will be a white, sweet flesh that tastes of playtime and has a satisfying crunch. Maybe there will be juice or cider to come. Or maybe the pleasure will all be in the expectation.

by Jemma Neville