How to pick an apple
Choose a day when you feel like being
part of something bigger.
Let an apple come-hither you,
reach up and – lightly! – cup it.
Lift it a little and feel in your hand
the weight – of a swelling blossom bud,
of the luck that kept the frost away,
the heavy scents of Spring
the weightless heft of all the bees
that carried the pollen to quicken the flowers;
the load of all the drops of rain,
the waxing and waning of light
the weight of weeks of sun on leaves,
the microscopic factories
that made the sugars that travelled the route
from cell to cell to here
the mass of the years that grew the crown,
of all the hands that pruned the branch,
the fungi and bugs that tend the roots,
the bird that dropped the original pip…
are you still holding your apple?
Give it a gentle twist.
If it’s ready to, it will yield to you,
as you will yield to it.
The Carse of Gowrie is full of orchards. New orchards and old orchards, and most of all, ghost orchards. There used to be many more, lost now to roads, housing, other crops.
Research into the historic orchards has shown that apples were never a great contributor to the agricultural commerce of the area – even in the heydays of the 1800s, the region’s income from top fruits was a fraction of that from barley, oats, and even ‘cutting grass’. But apples enable a different type of currency – one that is based on sharing abundance and celebrating local history.
In autumn, this currency has its moment. On a walk through Longforgan, I take home two deeply rosy, slightly wonky beauties from a crate outside a neighbour’s garden gate. They scent my pockets for days. In Errol, community gardeners gather to share the season’s work. At Guardswell on the Sidlaw slopes and at Fingask and Megginch down in the carse, cider-makers forage for the magic that they will bottle. Here, as elsewhere in Perthshire, community apple presses are wheeled out and set up. Over days and weeks, the stored sweetness of decades is coaxed back out into the world. Juice flows, pies bake, individual fruits are carefully stored for the winter. As often as not, no money changes hands. But these commonest of fruits, seemingly simple, have the power to bring people together.
Reference: Hayes, CW (2007) Historic Orchards of the Carse of Gowrie
