Taming Fruit
How Orchards Have Transformed the Land, Offered Sanctuary and Inspired Creativity
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A captivating cultural and scientific history of orchards, for readers of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.
Throughout history, orchards have nourished both body and soul: they are sites for worship and rest, inspiration for artists and writers, and places for people to gather. In Taming Fruit, award-winning writer Bernd Brunner interweaves evocative illustrations with masterful prose to show that the story of orchards is a story of how we have shaped nature to our desires for millennia.
As Brunner tells it, the first orchards may have been oases dotted with date trees, where desert nomads stopped to rest. In the Amazon, Indigenous people maintained mosaic gardens centuries before colonization. Modern fruit cultivation developed over thousands of years in the East and the West. As populations expanded, fruit trees sprang from the lush gardens of the wealthy and monasteries to fields and roadsides, changing landscapes as they fed the hungry.
But orchards don’t just produce fruit; they also inspire great artists. Taming Fruit shares paintings, photographs, and illustrations alongside Brunner's enchanting descriptions and research, offering a multifaceted-—and long-awaited—portrait of the orchard.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this fact-packed treatise, Brunner (Winterlust) delivers a global yet overgeneralized account of orchards and their relationship to humans. Brunner "began tracing the history of orchards because I wanted to better understand the coevolution of fruit trees and humans. This shared process changed both participants." Brunner moves chronologically from wild origins and godly gardens to present-day industrial farms, where economic and consumer demands have reduced fruit varieties and flavors while expanding size and shelf life. Along the way, he disperses plenty of cultivation and cultural knowledge: fruit remains found by the Jordan River are thought to date to paleolithic times, the overabundant and highly stylized gardens at Versailles could provide the Sun King's court with 4,000 figs a day, and Egyptian gardens were spots for gods to hang out on Earth: "The appropriate gods for a garden depended on the type of fruit cultivated there." (Grapes, for example, were harvested for Osiris.) Brunner shares several writers' perspectives on gardens, too: Guy de Maupassant adored Monaco's orange blossoms, and Goethe praised Italy's lemon groves. Despite the abundance of information, though, things don't come together to make a substantive bigger picture. Readers will be fascinated by the botanical anecdotes, but disappointed by where the path leads.
