Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] The Fatherland of Apples

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Fatherland of Apples
  • Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:40:27 -0700


"Vavilov is widely regarded as the world’s greatest plant explorer, for
he made over 250,000 seed, fruit, and tuber collections on five continents.
Tatiana credits him with first recognizing that Kazakhstan was the center
of origin and diversity for apples. “It is not surprising,” she
concedes, “that when Vavilov first came to Kazakhstan to look at plants
he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest.
That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was
born, this was its birthing grounds.”"


The Fatherland of Apples
The origins of a favorite fruit and the race to save its native habitat
by Gary Paul Nabhan
Published in the May/June 2008 issue of Orion magazine
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2961/

THE FRAGRANCE of the forest is unlike any I have ever known. The smell of
ripening and rotting apples and pears fills my nostrils. At my feet, russet
reds, blushing pinks, vibrant roses, and creamy yellows mottle the ground,
where wildlife has half-consumed the wild fruit that makes this Kazakh
forest so bountiful.

I scan this chaos of colors and inhale the fecund scents, pausing to take a
deep breath before chugging up through wild apple habitat unlike that of
any other place on Earth. Multi-stemmed apple trees begin growing at the
base of the ridge I am ascending and continue up to another taller ridge
behind it, and another behind it, nearly all the way to the crest of the
Tian Shan range that separates Kazakhstan from China. There are trees other
than wild pears, apricots, and apples within these forests, but I can’t
climb too far from one fruit tree before running into another, its fruit
hanging like so many ornaments on a holiday tree.

An earlier traveler through the region, one Victor Vitkovich, proclaimed
these naturally occurring groves to be “a marvelous garden where apples
and pears look down on you from the trees and beg to be eaten.” I oblige,
sampling the sweet and the sour, the mellow and the musky, the sugary and
the stringent fruit all around me.

I gained entry to these forests—some of them now protected by the Kazakh
government—through the good graces of two Kazakh conservationists, Aimak
Dzangaliev and Tatiana Salova, both associated with the Main Botanical
Garden in the city of Almaty, less than an hour’s drive from here. It
would not be hyperbole to call nonagenarian Aimak Dzangaliev the Asian
counterpart to Johnny Appleseed; indeed, that American folk hero might have
felt humbled by Dzangaliev’s prodigious work with apples, had the two
been contemporaries. This work has earned him praise from the likes of N.
A. Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, Michael Pollan, author of The
Botany of Desire, and The Book of Apples coauthor Joan Morgan, who has
tasted nearly every apple variety in the world.

Aimak Dzangaliev first considered devoting his life to apples in 1929, and
as of the summer of 2006, he was still actively working to study and
conserve and use the diversity of wild fruits in his homeland. He credits
his wife, Tatiana, several decades his junior, with ensuring his good
health and vigor by having provided him with several kinds of wild apples
every day since they were married. Wearing a fire engine–red dress that
exclaims I love apples! by its very intensity, the rosy-cheeked Tatiana
shares with her husband an awe for the overwhelming diversity of a single
wild apple species native to Central Asia: Malus sieversii. Tatiana marvels
at the variety of shapes, sizes, and colors of apples found within a
sixty-mile radius of their home. “Look at them,” she sighs, scanning
the season’s harvest. “There are apples the size of a large marble to
that of a small plum; some are very glossy, others are somewhat dull; their
skins are solid red, yellow green, or mottled russet . . . ”

Within this region of Kazakhstan, Dzangaliev and Salova have catalogued
more than fifty-six wild forms of Malus sieversii, twenty-six of which
might be called the basic wild ecotypes, with the other thirty being
natural or anciently semidomesticated hybrids. That is scientific shorthand
for saying that for thousands of years, forest dwellers have influenced the
diversity of these “wild forests,” selecting flavors, textures, and
qualities that persist in self-seeding or feral trees to this day. But
whenever I ask Dzangaliev or Salova how much of this diversity they
themselves have discovered and described, they defer credit to another
scientist—Aimak’s teacher and hero, Nikolay Vavilov, who spent a few
days in the region with Aimak when the latter was just a teenager.

Vavilov is widely regarded as the world’s greatest plant explorer, for he
made over 250,000 seed, fruit, and tuber collections on five continents.
Tatiana credits him with first recognizing that Kazakhstan was the center
of origin and diversity for apples. “It is not surprising,” she
concedes, “that when Vavilov first came to Kazakhstan to look at plants
he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest.
That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was
born, this was its birthing grounds.”

DISCERNING WHERE A CROP originated and where the greatest portion of its
genetic diversity remains extant may seem esoteric to the uninitiated. But
knowing where exactly our food comes from—geographically, culturally, and
genetically—is of paramount importance to the rather small portion of our
own species that regularly concerns itself with the issue of food security.
The variety of foods that we keep in our fields, orchards, and,
secondarily, in our seed banks is critically important in protecting our
food supply from plagues, crop diseases, catastrophic weather, and
political upheavals. Vavilov himself was personally motivated to become an
agricultural scientist by witnessing several famines during the czarist era
of Russia. He hoped that by combining a more diverse seed portfolio with
knowledge from both traditional farmers and collaborating scientists, the
number of Russian families suffering and dying from episodes of hunger
might be reduced.

In a very real sense, the forests of wild foragers and the orchards of
traditional farmers in such centers of crop diversity are where our food
truly comes from, the ultimate sources of our food crops’ resistance to
drought, diseases, and pests, and our primary means of staving off famine.
They are the wellsprings of diversity that plant breeders, pathologists,
and entomologists return to every time our society whittles the resilience
in our fields and orchards down to its breaking point, ushering in
pestilence and plague.

And whittle away we have done. Here in North America, according to apple
historian Dan Bussey, some 16,000 apple varieties have been named and
nurtured over the last four centuries. By 1904, however, the identities and
sources of only 7,098 of those varieties could be discerned by a USDA
scientist named W. H. Ragan, who devoted his career to tracking America’s
extant apple diversity. Since then, some 6,121 apple varieties—86.2
percent of Ragan’s 1904 inventory—have been lost from nursery catalogs,
farmers’ markets, and from the American table. In the southern U.S.
alone, it is estimated that only 300 of some 1,600 varieties that once
flourished in the region remain. The Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory of the
Seed Savers Exchange suggests that only a few hundred varieties of apples
are currently available from commercial nurseries, and just 15 varieties
account for 90 percent of all apples bought in grocery stores. Today, 129
of the remaining apple varieties have become rare enough to be boarded onto
Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste in the hope that being labeled
“endangered” might aid in their recovery.

North America may have once harbored a dazzling array of absolutely
delicious apples, but the magnitude of Kazakhstan’s current apple
diversity dwarfs anything that this continent has ever known, since apples
have been evolving in Central Asia for upwards of 4.5 million years.
Apples, however, do not comprise all of Kazakhstan’s bounty. Dzangaliev
and Salova have estimated that within Kazakhstan’s flora of 6,000
species, at least 157 are either the direct precursors or close wild
relatives of domesticated crops. Aimak and Tatiana believe that 90 percent
of all cultivated fruits of the world’s temperate zones were historically
found in Kazakhstan’s forests, confirming the country’s status—first
suggested by Vavilov—as a center of origin for many of the planet’s
major fruit tree crops.

AT THE AGE OF NINETY-TWO, Aimak Dzangaliev is hardly larger than the
smallest of Kazakhstan’s teenage boys. His countenance is much like that
of a Mongolian elder who has spent decades on the wind-swept plains of
Asia, gradually shriveling down by sun and wind to the size of a prune. But
when Nikolay Vavilov and his expedition first entered the Central Asian
crossroads of Almaty (known then as Alma-Ata), Aimak was just a tall skinny
kid fifteen and a half years of age. Fortunately, he heard from the master
of the stable where he worked that the world’s greatest scientist was
coming his way, despite having recently lost two horses.

His large almond-shaped eyes widen as he recalls what happened: “I was
just a boy, living with my sister and brother-in-law in a house adjacent to
a stable full of horses. There were no railways nor any paved roads in
Alma-Ata at that time. But when the owner of the stable learned that this
big expedition was coming toward Alma-Ata, he asked me to ride with him to
take a string of horses out to Lake Issik. He wanted to present a horse to
this great scientist to help him along on his expedition.”

To their surprise, Vavilov politely declined the horses, noting that a
newly fashioned motor vehicle was being sent out for them to use for a bit
of local exploration before they set off for China. Then Vavilov looked at
the boy and asked the stable owner if young Aimak could accompany him for
the day while he checked out the wild apple forests edging the Zailijskei
Alatau slopes above the city of Alma-Ata. These are the northernmost
highlands of the Tian Shan, and Vavilov needed someone with him who spoke
the local dialect of Kazakh and who more or less knew the terrain.

Aimak Dzangaliev grins as he tells of their time together. “Vavilov . . .
reviewed everything around Almaty in just one day. Given his genius, his
mind figured out just about everything!” he exclaims, meaning everything
about the ecology of the region’s apples.

Vavilov’s own notes, edited for inclusion in his book Five Continents,
relate his side of the story: “In literal translation Alma-Ata means
‘Father of the Apple.’ Thickets of wild apples stretch out in every
direction from the city, covering the slopes of the mountains with
extensive forests. In contrast to the small, wild apples of the Caucasian
Mountains to the west, the wild apples of Kazakhstan are mostly
large-fruited varieties, ones that hardly differ in their qualities from
fully domesticated ones.”

Vavilov arrived on the first of September, just in time for the apples to
ripen. “I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the center
of origin for the apple,” he noted, “where wild apples were difficult
to even distinguish from those which were being cultivated. Some of the
wild ecotypes in these forests were so superior in quality and size that
they could be taken directly from an orchard to market without anyone
knowing the difference. . . . That is not withstanding the fact that the
orchards here already include some of the finest, largest and most
flavorful of the European cultivars, not the least of which is the famous
Apport [or Constantine] apple.”

“He figured out everything,” Aimak Dzangaliev repeats, as if all of his
own research over the following half century had been anticipated by
Vavilov’s notes from little more than a day in the field. “He had
declined our horses, but he devoted himself to our apples.” He pauses for
a moment, and swallows deeply. “It became my dream to be with this
learned man, this mind. As a person, I am usually calm and in control of
myself, but this time, I was inspired. Why, I asked myself, have our wild
apple trees attracted the attention of such a genius?”

Dzangaliev’s answer to this question set him on a trajectory that
dominated the next seven decades of his life. If a world-renowned scholar
from Leningrad had risked his life to see the wild apples of Kazakhstan,
weren’t those apple forests worthy of further attention by the Kazakhs
themselves? By the time he was sixteen years old, Aimak Dzangaliev aspired
to get enough education to be able to study with Vavilov and then return to
Kazakhstan to study its wild fruits in depth. Within a decade, he had made
it to Leningrad, where he learned from Vavilov and his collaborators, and
joined in efforts to advance their research on the geographic origins of
crops. Hundreds of field trips, thousands of plantings, and dozens of
research publications later, Aimak Dzangaliev remains fascinated by this
one species’ natural diversity, and feels that he has not yet answered
all the questions about apples he set out to answer some seven decades
earlier.

OF COURSE MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE 1929, when Dzangaliev first showed Vavilov
the forests that literally surrounded the ancient city of Alma-Ata. Where
wild apple trees once grew along streams and fence lines, now there are
condominiums, shopping malls, and international banks in their stead.
Today, the modern city of Almaty has the forest fragments surrounded. Some
apple and pear trees still linger on the rough edges of the valleys, but
ironically, most of their former habitat has been intentionally planted
with European cultivars of domesticated apples. Tatiana Salova finds this
worrisome, for the wild apple habitats have dramatically declined in the
area since the 1980s.

“Only here have we ever found cultivated and wild trees crossing, but the
high number of cultivated trees is now swamping the wild remnants,” she
says. “Doctor Dzangaliev and I are very worried that there are few places
left anymore where wild trees grow nowadays without being surrounded by
cultivated trees.”

Some of the wild trees have been lost to the expansion of commercial apple
orchards, but most have found their space usurped by urban expansion. The
human population of Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, was about
456,000 in 1960. By the year 2000 it had more than doubled to 1,140,000.
The land area in high-density residential use within the Almaty
metropolitan region has increased 125 percent since 1964, with condominiums
and large hotels having edged in upon the street-side walkways formerly
lined with cultivated apple trees. When cider maker Frank Browning visited
Dzangaliev in 1992 while researching his book Apples, he saw how the
newfound oil wealth among the Kazakhs was proliferating second homes called
dachas in many of the upland sites that formerly offered ideal conditions
for wild fruit trees. A series of forest maps that Dzangaliev, Salova, and
their colleagues have elaborated over five decades reveal that between 70
and 80 percent of the apple forests in the mountains immediately
surrounding Almaty have been lost since 1960.

These trends have brought considerable sorrow to Aimak Dzangaliev. “It
was bad enough when a million wild apple trees disappeared during the
war,” he says, bitterly referring to World War II, when he himself lost
several toes to frostbite. He sighs, wringing his long, beautiful,
dark-skinned hands, and recalls how “on the Chinese border near Jungar,
the Soviet government used the apples to make vodka and jam, but then
destroyed all the trees, burning them as firewood. As Kazakh people today,
we are on the edge of another such abyss of genetic loss among our apples.
That is why I have written a report to the Kazakh Commission of the
Environment noting that less than 30 percent of the original stands of
apples remain and others will be lost if we don’t do anything to protect
them. I pointedly ask them, ‘Do you want to destroy the tree shown on the
national emblem of Kazakhstan?’”

But instead of accepting that reserving a few forest remnants is enough,
Dzangaliev has another future in mind for the apples of Kazakhstan—a
quest that parallels the efforts of a new generation of “reconciliation
ecologists,” who are working to save biodiversity in rapidly urbanizing
landscapes. Dzangaliev has proposed forest restoration in the best
remaining habitats, employing some twenty-seven clones of choice wild
apples that will be transplanted back into selected niches that fit their
ecological needs. Essentially, he is bypassing the narrowed-down gene pool
of domesticated apples, selecting only the most delicious and nutritious
wild and semimanaged apples for future cultivation. At the same time, he is
racing to put these twenty-seven clones into commercial production, making
the assumption that most Kazakhs will not ever fully respect the rich
genetic legacy of their native apples if they do not gain some income—or
at least some nutritional benefits—from them.

When I mention that his vision seems quite ambitious, Dzangaliev’s face
suddenly breaks into a large smile: “I have this joke with my wife,
Tatiana. We say that when I go to heaven to see what happens after I die,
Saint Gabriel will meet me at the gates and ask me what I have done during
my time on Earth that was good enough to allow my passage into heaven. I
will reply that I created twenty-seven new varieties from wild apples, and
with my wife, I helped create fourteen new varieties of apricots. Saint
Gabriel will then look astonished and ask me how many millions of people
have already eaten them. ‘None yet, really,’ I will answer, trying to
explain to him that such research takes some time to bear fruit.”

“Well unless the people begin to eat your apples very soon,” Tatiana
kids him, “Saint Gabriel will tell you, you will be going to Hell.”

“And it is because of Saint Gabriel,” Aimak Dzangaliev says, laughing,
“that I am anxious for my people to eat the wild apples of Kazakhstan
once again.”

Dzangaliev himself samples not one but several wild apples daily, since his
own studies show that they vary greatly in the vitamins and minerals they
offer. But for most Kazakhs, wild apples have become a marginalized element
of an increasingly globalized diet. Although Kazakhstan once served as a
breadbasket that buffered the former Soviet Union from widespread famine
several times over the last century, the country’s new affluence has led
to a decrease in dependence on local food production and an increase in
food importation. Dzangaliev seems wary of letting food self-sufficiency
slip too far away from his people. He remembers the winter of 1955, when
more than eight thousand hectares of fruit trees were killed by harsh
winter weather. Most of what was lost were the exotic Constantine apples,
for despite their gigantic size, they were poorly adapted to the climate of
Kazakhstan. Dzangaliev knows that a mix of wild apple ecotypes can better
withstand the stresses associated with a variable climate than a few big
cultivars can.

“That’s why I’m asking the Kazakh government for more money to get
the production of these apples on the fast track before I die.” At a
field station he helped establish in 1959 below the Jungar Alatau ridge, he
is hoping to ramp up the regeneration of wild apple planting stock in what
has already become the largest nursery in Kazakhstan. He has also proposed
a series of two- to three-square-kilometer protected forests as wild apple
reserves to be strategically placed on the edge of the city of Almaty. It
is a bold approach, linking the conservation of apples to both the health
and economic well-being of the humans living in the place where the apple
first originated, and where its highest diversity can still be found.
Anyone who enjoys eating apples should be wishing Aimak Dzangaliev and his
colleagues success.
------------

about the writer
Gary Paul Nabhan, CSE’s First Director
http://www.environment.nau.edu/aboutcse/Gary_Paul_Nabhan.htm

Gary Nabhan builds teams which bring a wealth of experience, talent,
energy, and passion to the projects of the Center for Sustainable
Environments at Northern Arizona University. Among his many accomplishments
during his years of studying and living in the Southwest, Nabhan co-founded
the non-profit conservation group Native Seeds/SEARCH, spearheaded the
Ironwood Alliance (responsible for research and public support that led to
a 120,000 acre Ironwoods Forest National Monument), and initiated the
Traditional Native American Farmers' Association. For such cross-cultural
collaborations, he has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and
a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.
Nabhan crosses disciplinary, linguistic and ethnic boundaries with apparent
ease, an essential skill for someone who lives and works among many
different communities in the Southwest.

In his position as the first Director of CSE, Nabhan is responsible for
coordinating an expanding array of environmentally oriented programs and
initiatives which bridge the NAU campus with the surrounding region. He is
also a tenured professor in Applied Indigenous Studies and the Center for
Environmental Sciences and Education, and helps to oversee the Graduate
Certificate program in Conservation Ecology. Nabhan's writing is widely
anthologized and translated, and has won the John Burroughs Medal for
Nature Writing, a Western States Book Award, and a Lannan Literary
Fellowship.





  • [Livingontheland] The Fatherland of Apples, Tradingpost, 03/13/2009

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page