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The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. Put this in mind. We at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:05]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by Priyanka Kumar, who is author of the Light Between Apple Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit. Welcome to the show, Priyanka.
- [02:30]
Priyanka Kumar
Thank you, Christina. I'm delighted to be here.
- [02:32]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you're here and that we get to learn about your book from you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
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Priyanka Kumar
Sure. I'm a lifelong naturalist. I had the good fortune of growing up in the foothills of the Himalayas, both the eastern and northwestern foothills, in the heart of the apple growing region there. So I was, from a very young age, I became interested in trees and plants and animals and mountains and rivers. And so that journey continued, thankfully. And I now live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where to some extent I would say that my life as engaged with the natural world as it was when I was a child. What's changed, of course, is my acute awareness that nature herself is changing at an extremely rapid pace. So, yeah, I think that kind of summarizes who I am. And I am also the author of Conversations with Birds, which was my previous book, before the Light Between Apple Trees.
- [03:57]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And you give us a vivid moment in the book that inspired the title. For listeners who haven't seen the book yet, can you take us to that moment that inspired the title?
- [04:08]
Priyanka Kumar
Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks, Christina. Early on, when I was researching the book, I found myself in one of the oldest orchards in the area where I live in New Mexico. And it actually took some persistence to get to this orchard. I had heard about it and I really wanted to go visit the orchard. But the land is owned by blm, which is a US Federal agency, Bureau of Land Management, and they keep the gate locked. So I had to find someone who worked there and knew what the codes were. And when he went there to take a peek at the trees, see how they were doing, he very kindly let me in as well. So it was raining that day, which is a bit of an anomaly in New Mexico. And I was pretty wet walking through, actually bushwhacking through these fields of overgrown vegetation, weedy fields, and making my way toward the apple trees, trying to avoid accidentally stepping on a rattlesnake because there are seven foot long rattlesnakes that are found in the area. And so finally we got to this acia and we hopped over it and I came upon a line of seven or eight glorious apple trees that were so heavy with fruit. And there was actually also a quince tree. And I was a little thirsty by this point. I hadn't brought water with me. And I just reached over and picked an apple and began to eat. And I looked up and I saw this line of ancient hills. And I happened to know that those hills are rich with petroglyphs. And I felt like being among the apple trees was circling me back to the kinds of rich experiences I'd had as a child living in the heart of the apple growing region in the foothills of the Himalayas. And suddenly and surprisingly, I felt at home and I felt that this is where I wanted to be. And I think to some extent, the rest of the book was me unpacking that feeling and trying to understand why an apple orchard, an ancient apple orchard, can make us feel so rooted and so present.
- [07:00]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And the book has a number of questions that run through it. You find these small pockets of orchard, wild fruits, of untended orchards, of. Of orchards that are thriving, but in a. In a land that's increasingly encroached on by development. And you keep coming back again and again to questions about what does it mean to preserve these spaces? What do we think as a society about these microclimates, about these pockets of nature, and what does it mean to us as people to become increasingly disconnected from the world outside the window and the world away from the screens that we're so used to looking at? Yeah.
- [07:45]
Priyanka Kumar
So I think probably one of the most important things that I feel that I do in this book is come up with and develop the concept of the micro wild. And what I mean by the microwild is fragmented pockets of nature which are still large enough to harbor biodiversity. And I stumbled upon private orchards and feral apple trees. And these are some of the discoveries that got me so excited about researching and writing this book in the microwilds. And I think that these shards of nature are, I would say they're almost jewel like, and they have a lot of potential to connect us back to nature because they still exist in areas that are close enough to our neighborhoods so that we can access them. Because, let's be clear, not everyone has access to what we might think of as the true wilderness, if such a thing even exists. But I may be able to spend a lot of time in national forests or wilderness areas, but I'm quite aware that not everyone has the ability to do that. But I think that this is where the micro wilds are so valuable because there are these fragments of nature that support creatures, you know, all the way from the hummingbird to the bear, and may have feral apple trees. And it feels like a discovery to get to know them. And I encourage people to get to know them as I take this journey in the book. But because these areas are so beautiful and they still are in somewhere in the greater circle of our neighborhoods, this also means that our micro wilds are under immense development pressures. And I think it's extremely important that we acknowledge the value of these micro wilds. And I think that's the first step to take before we start to think about how we might conserve these areas before it's too late.
- [10:17]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And because of where they're located, people can stumble upon them rather unexpectedly. You take us into the early stages of the pandemic. In your book, you're, you're out walking, more places are closed down. And one of the places you go walking is your daughter's preschool, which is shuttered because of the pandemic and yet really within feet of it. It almost feels like as we're reading the pages, you stumble across these, these wild trees.
- [10:45]
Priyanka Kumar
That's right, yeah. She had been at that preschool for, you know, at least a year, maybe a little more. And I had never realized that there was a microwild just literally several paces away. And I, I write in the book that sometimes children can be our greatest teachers because that last time that we went to go see that preschool and we, we did it in a way to honor the time that she had been there. She had been very happy there because they had this beautiful playground with large mature trees. So we, we went there kind of, the school was already closed, but just to say goodbye to was, you know, something that we wanted to do. And she literally tugged at our sleeves and wanted to take us to what she called the bridge. And sometimes these little kids, these four year olds had, you know, taken a field trip there for, for lunch to picnic near the bridge by the river. And so she wanted us to take, she wanted to take us there because this was a very special place for us. And so I'm very grateful that we listened to her and we just followed her, we followed this four year old child and she, she took us to this gorgeous space and we were astonished and, and then we just kept walking and walking and walking. Of course she got exhausted and so we had to end up carrying her back. But, but yeah, I would say that she opened this doorway for us. And I kept coming back to this place week after week during the pandemic. And I stumbled upon a private apple orchard. And I felt that the space had a very powerful draw, a real pull, kind of something magnetic. And I wanted to understand what was going on. And that was part of the inspiration for what eventually unfolded as a several year long journey to explore apple trees, apple science, apple history, and more importantly also these micro wilds that really have a power, a strong power to reconnect us to nature. I mean, there was a study that came out recently that found that since the industrial age began, our connection to nature has plummeted by 60%. And I feel that if we don't know the inner workings of nature, if we don't know the rhythms of nature, it makes it much harder for us to care when nature herself is changing in ways that are unpredictable, scary, damaging. So I think the first step really is to get to know nature more intimately. And this is where the micro wilds come in. This is where they're powerful medicine, medicine for our times.
- [14:06]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I truly believe that in the preface we. We meet little you in the Himalayas age, similar to your daughter in preschool there, showing you the trees. And the book goes full circle in many ways. In the epilogue, we see you finding letters that confirmed that your memories of that early childhood experience were correct. And we see you packing for this journey and getting, getting to hold these letters and see what they say, taking you back to the. To the Himalayas. The book itself is arranged by the calendar year. We start in August, we go all the way to the next August. We continue through to September and October. And throughout the book, you raise a number of questions and then you go to different experts and into research to answer them. And one of the questions was, you know, really how did the apple become associated with the United States, which is where you are located when you, when you were working on the book, and how did it arrive here? And you go through the science and it takes us to various places. It doesn't sound exactly like it's a settled matter because there are thousands of varieties of apples. But what did you find?
- [15:20]
Priyanka Kumar
Well, I mean, it was thrilling for me to journey. You know, I think I was, in a sense, I was journeying through all of these places that I describe. And you know, the apple, of course, as a lot of us know, it comes from the wild apple, the wild Kazakh apple, the scientific name is malasyversi, that to this day grows along the flanks of the Tianjin mountains in Kazakhstan. So the apple is a very interesting international fruit which during the Silk Road route started to spread eastward and westward, eastward to China and westward to Europe. And some very interesting things happen there. It's almost a scientific roller coaster to go through that journey. And I take readers through that roller coaster in the book. But eventually the apple hybridizes with the European crabapple and then starts to make its way to America. And that part I found to be equally fascinating because Americans have had a history with the apple that goes back more than 400 years. And often when we think about that history, we think about perhaps European settlers, such as British or let's say Irish settlers bringing apple seeds to America. But what I found fascinating is that the true history is much richer. The French settlers were bringing apple seeds, sometimes to Canada, that then made their way to America. And I like to tell the story of a particular apple variety that grows in this beautiful historic orchard not far from where I live, called Las Colandrinas, which means the ranch of the swallows. And, in fact, I was just there over the weekend for their harvest festival. It's become a ritual for me to go there every year, sometimes several times a year. And I've been doing this over the course of something like 17 years. And so there's an apple variety that they're growing there, and they call it the Wolf Willow apple. And, you know, as I was researching apples, and this is. This is a baking apple, very large baking apple, a wonderful tree. And as I was researching apples and I have, you know, different. Several different databases, I couldn't find an apple variety called the Wolf Willow.
- [18:18]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And.
- [18:19]
Priyanka Kumar
And I went back to the director there and asked them, you know, are you sure it's. It's the wolf willow? And he said, yeah, we're sure. We've been. We've had this apple for many, many decades now, and it's called a Wolf Willow. And so I started researching deeper, and I stumbled upon an apple called the Wolf river apple, which seemed to have almost exactly the same characteristics. And it turns out this was an apple that was first planted in Quebec in Canada. And then Sometime in the 1800s, a woodsman brought it over to the Wolf river in Wisconsin in America, and it was found growing there in about 1875. And then at some point, perhaps on the old Santa Fe Trail, it came all the way down to New Mexico to an old Spanish colonial ranch and was grown here. And somehow along the way, the name changed to Wolf Willow. And, you know, I went back and forth with several apple historians, and they agreed that my interpretation was correct. So in this case, we were able to, you know, trace the history. For me, it just kind of made me feel so much more connected to this apple variety, because it so happens that, you know, my. My husband's maternal ancestors are from Quebec. So it's almost as though I could. I could kind of envision the settlers from France coming to Quebec and then planting this apple, you know, way back several hundred years back, and then this apple eventually making its way by way of Wisconsin to New Mexico. So, for me, has a way of, you know, the apple. I was constantly blown away by how the apple has a way of bringing history to life and bringing science to life for sure, but also bringing history and culture to life and connecting us. So we feel that the apple is not necessarily the apple is an iconic American fruit, but really the apple is a transnational fruit. And we experience more fully when we know the history of the apple, that this fruit that we eat every day for lunch came from these wild mountains in Kazakhstan. I mean, wow, that's exciting.
- [21:00]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And you take us to that, you render that space for us in Kazakhstan and you bring us into this place of wondering of how did it get from here? Because it's not a location and reading it that any, anybody would just sort of, it's not easy to get to and wondering how then that moment happened, where then the apple started, you know, having almost this diaspora because.
- [21:28]
Priyanka Kumar
Was so.
- [21:29]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Remote where it used to be.
- [21:32]
Priyanka Kumar
Yeah, and, and that's, that's all very interesting because there's a impressive diversity of, within the wild Kazakh apple. So, you know, you find trees there, apple trees that are of different shapes and sizes and different crown shapes, different heights. It's all very interesting. And then the apples themselves, there's a great diversity within the apple. And a lot of those apples were sometimes they were savory or even a little bit bitter, and there certainly didn't taste like the apples, the sweet apple that we eat today. So the question is, you know, how did that happen? How did humans come up with more than 10,000 varieties of apples just from the wild Kazakh apple? And so that's a question that I explore in the book. And I mean, I think that's where science comes in and that's where history comes in, and that's where all these connections that we've been talking about come in. There are many, many, many hands that went into turning some of those savory, bitter apples into this fruit that we eat today. And part of it, of course, was as the apple was traveling through Europe, it hybridizes with this wild European crab apple, which is a much smaller apple and it's sour. And you know, there's an alchemy that takes place that then makes its way to America. And what's also interesting is that the, the settlers here were really passionate about this fruit. And sometimes they were planting apple trees even before they started to build their one room dwellings. So it was, it was so important to have these apple trees. And I should point out that, you know, they weren't necessarily eating apples back then. They were distilling cider from these apples. Drinking cider was actually safer than the brackish water that was available in those days. So there was this great culture of apple growing. And, you know, this. It kind of turned. It turned some of these new settlements into laboratories almost of new apple varieties, because people were planting all these different seeds that they had gotten from their original countries, their home countries. And now with apple trees, if you plant a seed, you don't necessarily get the variety that you might covet. Some of those varieties that the new varieties you might get might be spitters. But sometimes you. You do luck out and you get this amazing variety. So this is how America ended up getting, you know what, at one point, 16,000 named varieties of apple trees. And unfortunately, only about a fifth of those are accessible to us today.
- [24:52]
Dr. Christina Gessler
In the book, you tell us that those crab apples in Europe, it sounds endangered. There just isn't enough land and biodiversity supporting them. You take us to a time when you're out in nature and you come across a crabapple tree, and you're asking some local people, how do you eat these? And that brought me back to some childhood memories of visiting the Midwest and asking the same question. And you take us into the legend of Johnny Appleseed, and you unpack it a bit into a more reasonable story of a naturalist, a vegetarian, out planting seeds. You take us into the 1600s in New England, where we see orchards getting started with growing seedlings. You take us into the importance of the hard cider aspect of American culture. And I appreciated you highlighting that. And we have a story of George Washington asking that, you know, the constituents not be consuming the hard cider right before taking the vote. He didn't like the results of the vote. And the next vote, he made sure there was an ample amount of hard cider available for everybody. When I teach US history, I try to put in those pieces and people get horrified. But it helps us understand things like the apple, like American culture, like how people made decisions and how they lived. If we put all those pieces back.
- [26:17]
Priyanka Kumar
Yeah, I mean, the. And I think I was wowed by this again and again and again during the course of my research. And a lot of my research was quite experiential, as I think my writing is. So I spent about a month as a fellow at the center for Historic Plants by Monticello, researching not only some of the historic orchards in the Charlottesville area, but especially Thomas Jefferson's north and south orchards. Undoubtedly, I also struggled with how Jefferson had used slave labor to power those orchards. But I was also looking to study these orchards as a window into American history. And I was amazed by how vibrant the apple culture was back then to the extent that it wasn't just that, you know, some of these gentlemen farmers were growing a few apple trees, but, but they were really passionate about these varieties. I mean, Jefferson was taking detailed notes of the varieties that he was growing. He was sending varieties, he was boxing up and sending varieties to, to his friends in Paris. And you know, at one point when he was younger and he was in Paris, he complained, he wrote a letter back home and complained that they don't have apples here like the Newtown Pippin. Now the Newtown Pippin is of course, glorious, historic American variety. It dates back to 1750. It's one of the oldest varieties in the country. And, and it was a variety that not only was Jefferson a huge fan of it, but also some of the other founding fathers. Because this apple, it's a green apple, it's not much of a looker, but it's a real keeper. And back in the day when there was no refrigeration, when you needed to, these apples shipped very slowly wherever they went. You needed a keeper. And so this God, Benjamin Franklin thinking, and he decided that America should export the new town Pippin to England. And he made that happen. And this apple became a smash hit in England and Queen Victoria herself became a devotee. So you can kind of trust Benjamin Franklin to really make something of even an apple. So it was both an economic, political and cultural hit. And this is an apple that I'm now growing in my own garden. And the other day I, you know, we were, I was harvesting it with my younger daughter and I was telling her about the history of this apple. And so I think that, you know, and you can imagine a small child, I mean, they're wide eyed when they think about 1750, it feels so long ago. But I felt that harvesting this apple together, the Newtown Pippin, and then tasting it together really brought those times to life. So I think that the apple truly does have this amazing magical superpower to bring history to life.
- [29:44]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And in the book, you give us many glimpses of that. You referenced a moment ago, Jefferson's meticulous notes in his diaries and the letters he wrote that accompanied the shipments that he sent to various people of the apples, you know, fellow gentlemen farmers who were also growing apples, they compared notes, they shared samples with each other. You give us a glimpse into letters with John Adams where they're talking about, you know, how they're using seaweed. If for my research, I dug so much into 19th century New England and there's copious diary notes of harvesting seaweed and what you did with them in the orchards and things. You also take us into employment records, such as they were at the time that when farm laborers were paid in their. Basically their contract, it was stipulated how much hard cider they were going to get and what supply and how often. And as I mentioned earlier into voting stories that it was not only part of currency, but it was part of culture. It was part of people's social relations with each other. When you see them writing letters back and forth, sort of worrying about. About what's not going right and sharing information about what is going well.
- [30:56]
Priyanka Kumar
Yeah, I mean, it truly I felt inspired by. And I went deep into that correspondence. And especially, you know, John Adams. His story is amazing because you could feel good about telling his story because he was one of the only one in that group that actually wasn't using slave labor. He was using hired workers to.
- [31:20]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You.
- [31:20]
Priyanka Kumar
Know, mix that seaweed into his compost pile. And then they would spread it over a meadow where he was growing apple trees. And he was so much into cider. He had this daily habit. He wouldn't dream of starting his day without a jill of cider. And so he and his wife Abigail, I mean, that's. There's a beautiful love story there. They were growing their own apple trees and making their own cider. And it was his dream that one day his grandchildren would eat an apple from a tree that he had planted with his own hands. So I found that to be profoundly moving. But I also was moved deeply by these apple friendships that I was able to intuit through all the correspondence that I was studying. And I think that inspired me in my own own life. I mean, when I spent time in Charlottesville, for sure, I was coming into contact with people who might have different political inclinations, But I felt that we could all get excited about apples and apple history and cider. And I thought, how wonderful is this that you might disagree on a lot of the politics. Politics is so divisive these days, but you can still come together and agree about apples. You can have these apple friendships. So there was a tradition that I started during the pandemic when I missed not being able to have people over in my house. I would do these apple tastings from my porch, and all kinds of people would waft by. Neighbors and strangers and friends and especially kids. And I loved cutting open apples for kids and seeing their faces light up when you know if it was an unusual apple with unusual flesh inside, like the hidden rose, which I write about in the book. And so After I came back from Monticello, I continued this tradition of doing apple tastings with the community. And I see them, the people that I've met and interacted with and had experienced this kind of joy of sharing apples and connecting over apple varieties. I kind of see that as my apple friendships. So it's interesting how that the correspondence, the historic correspondence that I read sparked that. And it's really been so worthwhile and enriching to share these apple varieties not just in my own family, but in my community. And that aspect of it is particularly important to me.
- [34:16]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And you share in the book that your mom used to tell you that it was important to have nine different colors on your plate. And when you were doing these apple tastings, we can imagine because of the variety of kinds and textures, and that the flesh inside looks different and the peel outside, that you have those nine different colors. And to go back to you also, again and again, invite us into what the micro wild means, what our connection with nature means. And so you invite us into, early on in the book, into the story of Ursula. And while you are careful to let us know that you are not blurring the meaning of friendship, there, there are so many of those qualities of a healthy respect for her well being, who she is, what she needs. As we start to come close to the end of our time together, can you talk about the important relationship you saw with bears and the apples?
- [35:08]
Priyanka Kumar
Yes, that's a great question. And part of what got me excited about the microwild, the first micro wild that I deeply researched, and this is the same place where I experienced the private apple orchard and feral trees later. Is that a bear? And this is the bear that I named. Ursula was after her scientific name, that she was being sustained by these trees because I would see these paths that she would take and then I would see to get the apples. And then I would find the little spaces where she would rest and perhaps sleep. And they were lined by bare fur. And I really started to think, you know, what's happening to our ecosystems, what's happening to climate? And, you know, at a time when it's getting warmer and acorns, which bears might rely on, are perhaps not as abundant as they once used to be, it's important for Ursula to have access to some of these abandoned apple trees or feral apple trees, and they sustain her. And I really started to marvel at the power of the microwild to perhaps buffer some of the ways in which not just mammals like Ursula, but also different bird species are facing a lot of negative impacts from climate change. So I started to see the possibilities in the micro wild. So these are places that are not only capable of sustaining us humans and reconnecting us back to the wild, but they're actually offering daily sustenance to, you know, a bear who, perhaps because of habitat fragmentation, doesn't quite have, you know, the same kind of access to abundance that she was once used to. So, I mean, and this really brings us back to. And even in this microwild, during the course of my researching the book, I found that, you know, more and more structures were going up. And this really brings me to the heart of my concern, which is that if even the fragmented shards of nature are fragmented even more, at what point does kind of a micro ecosystem that they represent, at what point does that just completely buckle? And at what point does it just stop offering sustenance to those animals and to us? So if there's a thought that I would like to leave listeners with, it's just how important it is to get to know the microwilds around us. And while it's still possible to make sure that those areas are conserved for us and for the animals and birds.
- [38:26]
Dr. Christina Gessler
In one point of the book where you're considering the bears and the wild animals need for the fruit, for the biodiversity for the microwilds, you also invite us into the full circle of the story and you give an example of how one of the park services, they took a hunk of bear scat and they planted it to see what happened. And that really invites us into seeing the full picture here. So we don't normally talk about scat, but this is an important point and I didn't want to skip it, right?
- [39:03]
Priyanka Kumar
And basically what they did is that they took some bear scat and they planted it and they were amazed to see how many chokecherry seedlings came out of it. And chokecherry. And that's another plant that I'm growing right now. It's very difficult to grow from seed. So what's interesting is that. And you need a lot of chokecherries and forests to support all kinds of wildlife. Wildlife. So it's very interesting that bears, through their scat, are actually planting these vegetative communities that support not just bears, but also birds and also us, because there's a lot of communities here who, who make. It's a tradition for them to make chokecherry jam. So it's, for me, it's very interesting to see all of these connections. And we, I think for too long, since the industrial Age, we've thought of animals and other wildlife as the other. So we humans living in our habitats and then there's the animals way over there. But really, if you look deeper into the inner workings of nature, and by the way, we're as much a part of nature as the black or the brown bear is. If you look into the inner workings of nature, you know, it's a revelation. And you see all the different ways in which we are connected. And it is to our benefit to not shut out nature, to not kind of, you know, live on islands of asphalt and concrete, because that doesn't serve us, it doesn't serve our bodies and it doesn't serve our minds and hearts. So this is why I feel that it's such a revelation to discover the microbial, that there's still this. I see these microbials as a circle of hope around us and that we discover them and we make sure that that doesn't get fragmented any further, because that's been doing work that's so desperately needed. All of these, all of this wildlife that's, you know, in some cases precipitously declining due to climate change, global warming, drought, what have you, this is a buffer zone and we need to protect this buffer zone.
- [41:37]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book is vividly rendered in any scene. We can picture ourselves there. We can visualize what you're talking about, and in doing so, we're invited into the biodiversity and into new ways of understanding why it matters. For example, to the crab trees that we were talking about earlier and how you probably don't want to pick a crab apple and eat it right off the tree. If I remember my childhood experience correctly, that they also bloom in such a way that they're really important for the pollinators. And then in another section of the book, you contrast your experiences in nature of really meeting these different trees. We see you studying them and seeing where the fruit is located and asking local people about them. But there's an important contrast with when your husband buys these apples at it sounds like a farmer's market type store. We think by the name of them that they're going to be lovely and organic. And you call them cardboard to eat. And those moments contrast with each other in reminding us that just having a few kinds of apples available affects our biodiversity, not just our palate, but it affects all of the nature that is intertwined with each kind of plant that we have.
- [42:56]
Priyanka Kumar
Absolutely. And I think it is key for us to protect apple biodiversity. My husband got those apples from natural grocers, you know, A fairly organic grocery store in Santa Fe. And these were organic Golden Delicious apples that came all the way from British Columbia, I believe. And he got a bunch of them, and they were all hardboard, they were hollow inside, and it felt like eating cardboard. And during the harvest season, I especially take care to go out to orchards or farmers markets. And of course, I'm harvesting my own apple trees now. But I think it's so amazing when you learn that you may have orchardists in your own area. I mean, on Labor Day weekend, I was doing this long hike and I was kind of hot and a little sunburned. And as we were driving back, I saw an ancient looking orchardist selling apples from the back of his truck. And so I kind of swerved, this is the kind of thing I do, and got to where he was and started to study the apple varieties he had. And he had some Jonathan's, which has been called the essence of the American apple, and some early Golds. And pretty soon we were talking about the other varieties he grows that I'm also a big fan of, like the Maiden's Blush and the Rome Beauty. And I can't tell you how pleased he was to find a person who could actually talk apple varieties with him. And he put out this, you know, a very kind of wrinkled and tanned hand and introduced himself. And I shook his hand. It felt like a compliment that he'd shaken hands with me. And I found myself carrying a crate full of apples, different varieties, back into the trunk of my car. And I felt that, you know, why would a person living in Santa Fe, why would she buy apples coming all the way from British Columbia with all those carbon costs involved? Why not, you know, connect to the richness right here? We have apple farmers right here, orchardists growing apples in beautiful historic areas such as Chamayo, where this particular apple orchardist was from. And then suddenly, that apple is not just an apple. I found myself a couple of days later sharing that crate of apples with my community. And pretty soon we were talking about the Jonathan apple and the early Gold. And then one of the people who had shown up is from Normandy, and she was talking to me about French apple varieties and how eating these apples here during the tasting was bringing back to life her own childhood memories. So I feel that there's a great deal of richness in tapping into the local apple culture wherever we might live. And, hey, there are people in B.C. who might enjoy those apples much more. And by the time those Golden Delicious make their way to Santa Fe, it's no wonder that they've gotten pretty cardboardy.
- [46:19]
Dr. Christina Gessler
My final question today is what do you hope listeners will take away?
- [46:24]
Priyanka Kumar
I mean, two things, really. Certainly getting to know different apple varieties, whether it's at your farmer's market or at local orchards, but also making the connections, also realizing how fostering apple diversity is also closely connected to other kinds of biodiversity in nature, biodiversity when it comes to birds and native mammals. And really thinking about all of these connections circling back to the microwild here, where you can actually discover this biodiversity for yourself and experience how being in nature, going on these journeys can be extremely fulfilling at a time when so many of us are caught up in these electronic devices and they are impacting our mental health in unprecedented ways. I think it's very important to come back to some of those more sensory, satisfying threads of human existence. I mean, we were talking about the, you know what my mom used to say about the nine colors on your plate and that there are these beautiful apple varieties for us to discover and a beautiful variety of birds that are probably drawing sustenance from the microwilds around us. So, so tapping into those riches. But, but, you know, it does take us stepping out of the door and experiencing nature for herself in order to tap into the beautiful riches that I've been describing.
- [48:16]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Priyanka Kumar, and sharing about your book the Light Between Apple Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit. You've been listening to Academic Life. Please join us again.
- [48:36]
Priyanka Kumar
Sam.