Apples and The Botany of Desire
I'm currently reading Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire. I'm in the second section that relates to flowers in general and the tulip in particular. However this post concerns itself with the first section of the book, the section which focuses on apples. I never really thought about it much but if I had, I'd have probably assumed that apple trees were grown from seeds. Oddly enough it turns out that's not usually the case. You see, apples are a very sexually expressive species. The progeny vary extensively from the parents. So you can have a tree that bears great apples and find that not a single seed from that tree results in a commercially viable apple tree. If the story stopped there you'd probably have never eaten a single apple--and not even have heard of them. The apple tree first appeared in Kazakhstan, a former republic of the Soviet Union, where it still grows wild. The wide variety of characteristics contained in the seeds has allowed the apple...