An orchard is an idealized or domesticated version of a forest, and the transformation of a shadowy tract of wilderness into a tidy geometry of apple trees offered a visible, even stirring, proof that a pioneer had mastered the primordial forest. Compared to the awesome majesty of the old-growth trees the early settlers encountered, the modesty of an apple tree, the way it obligingly takes on the forms we give it, holding out its fruit and flowers so near to hand, must have been a tremendous comfort on the frontier.
That's one reason planting an orchard became one of the earliest ceremonies of settlement on the American frontier; the other was the apples themselves. It takes a leap of the historical imagination to appreciate just how much the apple meant to people living two hundred years ago. By comparison, the apple in our eye is a fairly inconsequential thing - a popular fruit (second only to the banana) but nothing we can't imagine living without. It is much harder for us to imagine living without the experience of sweetness, however, and sweetness, in the widest, oldest sense, is what the apple offered an American in Chapman's time, the desire it helped gratify.
It wasn't until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter the lives of very many Americans (and most of them lived on the eastern seaboard); before then the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of fruit. And in America that usually meant the apple.
-- "The Botany of Desire", Michael Pollan
That's one reason planting an orchard became one of the earliest ceremonies of settlement on the American frontier; the other was the apples themselves. It takes a leap of the historical imagination to appreciate just how much the apple meant to people living two hundred years ago. By comparison, the apple in our eye is a fairly inconsequential thing - a popular fruit (second only to the banana) but nothing we can't imagine living without. It is much harder for us to imagine living without the experience of sweetness, however, and sweetness, in the widest, oldest sense, is what the apple offered an American in Chapman's time, the desire it helped gratify.
It wasn't until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter the lives of very many Americans (and most of them lived on the eastern seaboard); before then the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of fruit. And in America that usually meant the apple.
-- "The Botany of Desire", Michael Pollan