Apple Trees
After the lumbermen swept through Northern Michigan, a new kind of crop was widely planted in our area—apple trees. 7500 cultivars of this incredibly long-lived and adaptable food source exist in the world today, and even on our own land, we have at least four distinct types of apples, each with its own maturation time, taste and texture. Woven into the hardwood forest and even down in the cedar swamp, we have found ancient trees fighting to hang on as the larger species around them outcompete them for light and nutrients. Our job has been to push back the forest a bit and judiciously prune what branches have given in to time at last.
The trees themselves are amazingly resilient. Some trees can live for more than a century, although 50-80 years is more common. One local remedy for an ailing tree is to shoot it with birdshot—this seems to shock the system and the tree responds by putting out new branches. We tried this on a previous property and stunningly, it worked. (Our local arborist found it a bit violent.) We’ve also learned to trust the adage: “when it comes to apple trees, prune out what you think needs to be cut…then double it.” I’ve found that in my own life if I am willing to cull and let go and simplify, I am less “owned” by stuff and the responsibility that ownership brings. This gives me the energy to bring out music, art and writing. The Tiny House movement echoes this sentiment in modern living—trim away what you do not absolutely need, and you will have more material and inner resources with which to truly enjoy and experience life. Work for living and experiencing, not for things.
This year, many of the trees have held onto their fruit well into single digit temperatures and snow. I can’t help but imagine the delighted animals who find the apples late in the season, as other food sources disappear beneath the white. Earlier in the fall, groups of deer gathered beneath the trees, rearing up on their hind legs to knock down the treats, even in the middle of the day and just off the busy highway. And there is nothing funnier than watching a young raccoon wrestle an apple away into the woods to eat. Apple trees become nexus points for sustaining life.
Many folks in the North Country are eager to use old applewood to smoke fish and other game. Apple burns very hot and emits a lovely scent that soaks into the meat. Most of us know the phrase, “an apple a day….” Traditionally, apples themselves have been used to treat diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer, most likely because of their high fiber and relatively low sugar content. In folk medicine, apples were even used on the scalp to prevent baldness. Apples are believed to decrease allergies presenting as skin rashes, asthma or sinus issues.
Mythologically, the apple tree shows up across the world in many guises. Called the tree of love and health, it also bears the Christian onus of being the Tree of Knowledge that produces the apple Eve gives to Adam to eat. (I am delighted when I hear the revisionist interpretations of this Genesis story—that the feminine offers the masculine the fruit of love which awakens them both and makes the “idyllic” but limited life of the garden no longer tenable for complete human beings.) I’m very taken with the Celtic Isle of Avalon (the Island of Apples) where King Arthur was healed and awaits the time to return, as well as the Goddess Aphrodite and Hera’s association with apples and orchards. Interestingly, in the druidic tradition, the silver branch with bells, the symbol of wisdom, is cut from apple trees, and when shaken softly and rhythmically, induce a trance state called for in shamanic journeying.
For me, the apple trees appear in the dark wood as markers of the past. When we coax them to send out new branches and fruit, I feel the shiver of a kind of resurrection, of awakening a being who saw the death of the old forest to the lumbering industry and the slow revival of the new growth. I hold a fallen branch to my nose, and can catch the lingering sweetness of apples, like pie scenting a home during the holidays. The fruit lures in more than deer—and when eaten by animal or human, the tree leaps free of the soil on wing and hoof or hiking boot, the web of life rebounding in joy and transformation, an original communion as old as life itself.