About those wild mustards

With thanks to Ellin Barret who first piqued my curiosity for this post.

Because a friend posted this meme, I was off and running. So I decided to let my fingers do the walking through Wikipedia to resolve for once, and for all, the differences between the escaped feral “wild” mustards that ravage the California landscape in spring. And yes, we do have several rather diminutive native mustard species.

What I discovered is that there was not one species, but over 30 separate species of “wild” mustard plants or brassica. And very few “wild”mustards are actually wild, they are almost all feral. Our most favored mustard species, Eurasian Brassica oleracea, that the ancient Celts and Romans were so fond of, gives us those yummy cultivars (all from the same species, like a breed), including kale, cabbage, collard greens, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, etc.

Although some species of mustard plants were established crops in Hellenistic and Roman times, there are few archeological records. Wild forms of mustard and its relatives, the radish and turnip, found over Eurasia, suggests domestication took place in that region. However, Zohary and Hopf conclude: "Suggestions as to the origins of these plants are necessarily based on linguistic considerations." The Encyclopædia Britannica states that mustard was grown by the Indus Civilization of 2500–1700 BC. —Wiki

An Asian mustard species from the Hindu Kush, Brassica rapa, one of the first invasive field mustards to bloom in California, gives us bok choy, Napa cabbage (really Beijing cabbage!), rapini, turnips, canola oil, etc. More on native and invasive mustards here.

Highly invasive black mustard or Brassica nigra is the most common species found in California. The seeds were theoretically brought here by the Franciscan friars scattering mustard seeds as they walked from mission to mission—bits and seeds of B. nigra were found in adobe brick made in the 1700s. 

Also, according to the scriptures, tiny mustard seeds were held in high regard because though the seeds may be small, their potential for growth is enormous; to enter the kingdom of heaven begins with faith. Jesus was reputed to have said:

"For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20-21)

Nearly all Brassica seem to have one thing in common, a four-petaled flower shaped like a cross, hence the name cruciferous vegetables. Even the diminutive jewelflower species of California, Nevada and the Southwest have four petals, but they are so tiny, they are nearly invisible. 

No matter how you feel about invasive species, I must admit that it is pretty stunning when entire hillsides are solid yellow with mustard in spring. It’s a great cover crop, conditions the soil (and kills pests.) But it is so invasive that it also smothers all native species—including our diminutive milk maids, and vigorous California poppies.

And yes, we do have many diminutive native California brassica species according to iNaturalist. My personal favorites are a magenta wallflower, or rockcress, milk maids, desert candles, and the crazy stripped-down endemic jewelflowers—some species so rarified they only grow in one small patch in the world. It seems that each mountain range has its own species of jeweleeed—and most are endangered species.

And closely related to black mustard, and B. rapa, the Brassica napus or brown mustard species, aka rapeseed, also gives us canola oil, Siberian kale, and rutabagas. Originally from India, it spread to Asia and farmers diversified it by developing cultivars. It's a really popular cover crop in Ukraine along with those heliotropic North American sunflowers. 

Yes, North American: Helianthus annuus—though they were first domesticated and cultivated by Native Americans 4500 years ago, they were commercialized in Russia and Ukraine. Sunflowers and mustard are important sources of vegetable oil. All that oil to fuel the world. We won’t discuss the atrocities suffered by mustard gas unleashed by the Germans at Ypres during World War I.

The ancient Romans not only invented fish sauce (of the Worcestershire persuasion), they also might have invented mustard as a condiment (the Egyptians also used mustard) by mixing ground mustard seeds with grape juice (called “must"), thus giving us the word mustard!

The word "rape" came from Latin for turnip, rāpa or rāpum, Greek word ῥάφη, rhaphe. The Romans were quite crazy for their cabbages. 

Radish means root in Latin. Apparently Egyptians were noshing on radishes before the Pyramids were built. Perhaps the workers were fueled on by radishes and salt. After all, the Romans paid their workers with salt, which means salted cruciferous greens, hence the word salary.

Meanwhile, the French are still buttering and salting their radishes. Forget about that sinus cleaner, Japanese wasabi. Medieval Germans were so crazy for radishes that they grew them bigger and better. Imagine massive 100-pound radishes ravishing the countryside. Radishes, not mustard, were the first cruciferous crops introduced to the Caribbean in the 1500s.

Brassica oleracea probably came from Crete. Or it was a stowaway on Jason’s Golden Fleece. The Greeks too were so mad for radishes (which probably came from China by way of Egypt), that they made little gold radish talismans to offer up to Apollo. Why the sun god needed radishes is anyone’s guess. You’d think horses or chariots or wine would’ve been a more practical gift. Ok, I’ll stop rooting around now on Wiki.

Note bene: I never know where writing ideas will come from. It always catches me by surprise! When I was a child, I was always making equivalencies, that is relationships between things—especially plants and animals. I guess some things never change. When I finally adulted (some could clain that I am still attempting to achieve adulthood), I discovered most of my correlations were spot on. 

At one point, I thought all that wild mustard was native, and it was only one species. When I joined a California naturalist group, I learned that there were more than one invasive mustard species, and that’s probably the thing that spurred me on because I cannot tell the difference between field mustard and black mustard, it’s all mustard to me.

Hoppity-hop picking in Sonoma County

Historic Walters Ranch Hop Kiln, Westside Road, Healdsburg, built by Angelo Soldini in 1905. California Historical Landmark No. 627 ©️ Maureen Hurley ca. 1981.

Before Prohibition, Sonoma County led the nation in the production of hops. Hops, a beer preservative, was first planted near the Laguna de Santa Rosa in 1858, and by 1899, more than 2000 acres were in full production. A story from 1900 in the San Francisco Chronicle estimated that 7,500 acres of hops were planted in Sonoma. From the early 1900s to about 1940, hops, not grapes, was king.

“Sonoma County produces the finest quality of hops grown on the Pacific Coast….there is more lupulin and a stronger aroma…which brings from one cent to two cents per pound more money in the market.”—Sunset Magazine Homeseekers’ Bureau, 1915

Apparently the top dollar paid for the superior California-grown hops was London, England. 

“From 1915 until 1922 California was the leading hop-producing state in the Union." (Tinged with Gold: Hop Culture in the United States, Michael A. Tomlan).

Hops (Humulus lupulus) related to cannabis, originated in Egypt and China; there is also a wild species native to the US. With hops, it's all about the lupulin. The unfertilized female blossom, or cone, laden with yellow lupulin powder and resin, is used to preserve and flavor beer. The hops varietals grown in Sonoma County were far superior to hops grown in other regions. During the 1930s, Sonoma County produced over 30 million pounds of dried hops.

Hop production survived Prohibition and the Volstead Act of 1919, but languished, shall we say, even tanked? during the post-war economy—despite the fact that Sonoma County was a bootleg capital of California. 

The use of nitrate fertilizers also introduced a mildew blight which ultimately killed the hops industry. By the 1960s, hops was no longer commercially viable, though escaped volunteers grew along the Russian River along with the native wild grape vines.

My first boyfriend's mother Leeta (a Petaluman who went to school with Lloyd Bridges) used to earn her pocket money harvesting hops (and fruit) every summer. During hop-picking-time, she waxed on poetically how families camped out under the stars all summer long picking fruit. 

However, she said that picking hops was brutal on the hands. Not to mention feet—they used stilts to reach the trellised hop buds. Hopping for hops. She preferred picking pears and prunes to hops. Hop picking season was short, at the end of summer. In 1940, when his hop pickers went on strike, Florian Dauenhauer of Santa Rosa invented a mechanical hop harvester that is used to this day.

During the 1990s, I was at Kat & Boz WIlliams' home on Peaks Pike Road in Graton and they served me steamed hop shoots and buds for dinner—they tasted like asparagus—and I was even given a furry feisty hop vine to take home, but it just wouldn’t grow under an oak tree in Forestville. It needed more sunlight. Or I was a lousy hop grower.

Hop-picking at Healdsburg, Cal. photo: MD Silverstein —Healdsburg Shed

The cultivated history of daffodils as we know it

A daffodil admiring itself in the mirror, ca. 2008. I forgot to date it.

Note bene: This blogpost began as an excerpt from a letter I wrote to novelist Gregg Dunnett who emigrated to Spain from Britain and was missing his daffodils. I never did get around to reshaping my notes into a blogpost, until a year later, so these notes are convoluted. 

Lechyd da! Those daffodils that everybody bashes over their neighbors’ heads in Wales on March 1 may not be native to Britain because daffodils, as we know them, along with rabbits, originally hailed from Iberia! So get your repatriation papers in order. 

In Wales, the daffodil is known as cenhinen Bedr or ceninn Pedr in Welsh—that which is like St. Peter’s leeks. It’s a complicated simile. The daffodil leaves resembled a leek that rules out daffodils as being native in Wales as they didn’t even know its name. According to a 1630 broadside ballad, the Welsh wore leeks in their hats to recognize friend from foe before the battle won on St David's Day. And ate them afterwards. Crossing leeks and daffodils, the national flower of Wales, could be dangerous as they are, like all lilies, extremely toxic. Don’t tell Saint Dewi.

Sant Dewi stained glass window at St Non's Chapel; note the flowers—daffodils. Wiki

To be fair, there might also have been a “native” plant that resembled the narcissus/daffodil/jonquil in the British Isles. However, I don’t trust the sources (since they’ve all copied each other, warts, and all) though I’ve included the links below. People often confuse the concept of native wildflowers with escaped naturalized cultivar flowers. Like with mustard, forget-me-nots, and Scottish bluebells…. the word “wild” can swing both ways.

But I did find this: “ The only species of narcissus native to Britain is the rather demur Lent Lily…” However, The National Records of Scotland misidentified the daffodil, or narcissus as a member of the Primulaceae family. Ak! Nope. Strike the word, “native,” add “naturalized.” (Unless it is a primrose —not a daffodil.) At least Wikipedia got that part right—they came from Iberia. I should’ve just begun my quest with Wikipedia, and saved myself a lot of grief, but I wanted original sources.

That classification error by The National Records of Scotland led me on a merry Google chase—because despite Easter being movable feast, the idea of a flower named after Lent certainly suggests a long-term cultivation. For the record, the narcissus or daffodil is a member of the Amaryllidaceae family, a lily with six tepals, and not a four-petaled primrose (oxlip looks a bit like a narcissus). And narcissi are not native to the British Isles.

In the middle ages, narcotic cowslips were called St. Peter’s herb. Wiki

And it doesn’t help that the origin and symbology of the daffodil is muddied by the strife between Catholicism and Protestantism. I suppose we could blame Martin Luther who never saw it coming when he nailed his theses on the church door at Wittenberg in 1517.

The folklore surrounding the daffodil is diverse. During the middle ages, narcissus was associated with the Virgin Mary and resurrection. Its leaves were compared to a spear, its sap was a gateway drug to the undiscovered country from which no one returns. Elysian Fields and all that. I can see the leaves of daffodils compared to spears, and Dame Edna (yes, I met him too) said that gladiolus refers to the Celtic Claymore sword. (See Narcissus in Culture.)

Etymology Online revealed that the word daffodil possibly arrived by way of Middle English affodill " (ca. 1590s) by way of the Dutch affodyle), via medieval Latin, via Ancient Greek—to make numb. Narcissi, like all lilies, are extremely toxic. But despite the added-on article, “d,” an accretion from the Dutch “de affodyle,” references cite the word (d)affodil itself as from an unknown source. Another source stated that affodyle means 'that which comes early.’

I tried another approach. First reference in English. Terminus post quem (TPC—that is, the first ever literary mention I could find…) During the “late 16th and early 17th century botanists and herbalists John Gerard and John Parkinson described them as "Pseudonarcissus Anglicus pleno", "Gerrards double Daffodill".

Ok, that reference suggests that cultivated daffodils were introduced before 1629, as there were notices concerning the introduction of daffodils to the British Isles. This may be one of the earliest citations. (And don’t forget the 1630 Welsh reference to daffodils as Saint David’s leeks). When I looked up the original source, the gardener-monk Gerard wrote that “The common yellow Daffodilly or Daftodowndilly is fo well knowne to all, that it needeth no deicription.” He also noted with almost a nod that they originally came from Spain.

“The double yellow Daffodill hath fmalf finooth narrow leaues of a darke greene colour: among which rifeth up a naked hollow ftalke, of two hands high: bearing at the top a faire and beautifull double yellow flower…The common yellow Daffodilly or Daftodowndilly is fo well knowne to all, that it needeth no deicription. We haue in our London gardens another fort of this common kinde, which naturallic groweth in Spaine, very like vnto our beft knowne Daffodil in fhape and proportion…” —Gerard’s Herbal 1597

Gerard’s Herbal may be a TPQ for the term, daftodowndilly/ daffodowndilly, not A.A. Milne. Move over Winnie the Pooh! But Milne got it right, when the daffodil arrives, it’s a sure sign of spring. Winter is dead. 

Garden historian, Dr. Twigs Way, who is associated with the Cambridge University, gets it wrong too as she too repeats that Britain also has wild daffodils. She goes on to say “Daffodils… have been seen in England since the 17th century; Shakespeare celebrated them as the flower that “comes before the swallow dares”, and bunches of wild blooms were sold by flower girls on the streets of London.” 

The full Shakespeare quote: “Daffodils/ that comes before the swallow dares, and takes /the winds of March with beauty…”, (Winter’s Tale, Act IV Scene 3), which makes the reference date ca. 1609-11. Too late. Not TPQ.

Dr. Twig’s 17th century reference is too late on the cultural horizon, as by the Elizabethan era, daffodils and asphodels were firmly ensconced, if not entrenched in English literature. Somehow the dubious connection with the asphodel and daffodil ca. the 15th c. isn’t exactly a TPQ either. By the time the Daffodil Society was founded in 1898, the greeny asphodel dominated the decorative arts—especially William Morris’s wallpaper. No, not the wallpaper Oscar Wilde morbidly objected to. (And yes, like Winston, I ended that sentence on a preposition.)

I was reminded that William Carlos Williams wrote: "Asphodel, that greeny flower." I always wondered what the greeny asphodel was. (I was lazy and went to school before internet!) You know how the poets are overfond of death as muse. But Milton said it earlier: “To embathe in nectared lavers strewed with asphodel.” (Comus, 1634). And Tennyson wrote: "Others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel." 

And somewhere along the way, the similar sounding asphodel and daffodil and their death mythology were conflated with each other. cross colonization. Deep botany as we know it hadn't yet been invented. Asphodelaceae (which includes the red hot poker plant) wasn’t identified by Carl Linnaeus until 1753. Let that sink in.

So here’s the rub, asphodel is a completely separate family that got kicked out of the lily family along with aloe and asparagus by the way. DNA never lies. Allo? Who’s your daddy? And they do look like our New World Oenothera, aka evening-primrose. And there were no less than 10 different species of asphodel on the Iberian peninsula. The yellow ones do look a bit like daffodils if you have a good imagination, or need glasses and hearing aid.

Cleric Robert Herrick, in To Daffodils (1648), described narcissi as portents of death: Fair Daffodils, we weep to see/ You haste away so soon…And of course, By the time Wordsworth wrote his famous 1804 poem, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, When all at once I saw a crowd/A host, of golden daffodils;/Beside the lake…daffodils were thoroughly naturalized and canonized ad nauseam in English literature.

A teacher asked me for a drawing to go with Wordsworth. I got an epic sunburn in Feb.

Digging deeper, I found a vague reference: “Daffodils were introduced into gardens in about 300 BC. The Greek botanist and philosopher Theophrastus listed and described many of the earliest known kinds of narcissus in his nine-volume 'Enquiry into Plants'. Daffodils were brought to Britain by the Romans who thought that the sap from daffodils had healing powers.” (What? 300 BC? Asphodel or daffodil? Whose gardens? Where?)

I found another plagiarized source: “Narcissi were introduced to the UK in about 300 BC by the Romans who later inexplicably abandoned these blooms.” What? Somebody lifted and condensed  the sentence out of context, replete with the arrival date typo. Now, I’m fairly certain that the Romans had not settled in Britain circa 300 BC. That quote should probably read that in Greece and also in Rome people were cultivating daffodils circa 300 BC. In the Mediterranean, not Britain.

Trying to find out the truth about daffodils from the internet is like trying to sort out whether or not rabbits were brought to southern Britain by the Romans, or if they were introduced later during the Norman Conquest. See, that inexplicable line of logic suggests that daffodils were not introduced to Britain at all by the Romans, but much later. Like the rabbits. It always amazes me that people post nonsense and don’t even verify the basics—like a timeline.

A close-up, Mr. deMille, stabilo, pencil, ca. 1994; original drawing was destroyed.

I tried another approach. DNA. Yep, genetics definitively rules out the possibility of there being any endemic narcissi in Britain (see excerpts from a paper, below). Genetics can measure what is lost in the process of cultivation, and defines Iberia as the homeland of British “wild” daffodils. Iberian narcissi have the most genetic diversity whereas the daffodil cultivars of Britain have a truncated genetic pool. And the answer is daffodils were not introduced by the Romans. Certainly not in 300 BC! 

Also, narcissi weren’t even cultivated until Muslim era ca. the 10th -12th centuries. Etymology Online, footnotes daffodil with: “First reference to the yellow, early spring flower we know by this name (Narcissus pseudo-Narcissus) is from 1590s.” So, I didn’t get my TPQ closure as to when daffodils were introduced to the British Isles, but I can surmise they arrived from Holland somewhere around the 15th to the 16th century, and, as they say, the rest is history. at least the Welsh had enough common sense to not conflate the daffodil with the asphodel and made a leeky simile instead. Ceninn Ped. Happy St. David’s Day.

I was playing with backlighting. These daffodils were miniatures from the supermarket.

Musing on mallows (photos)

Abutilon ssp., Indian mallow, wild cotton—but the shiny leaf is wrong—a Hybridum? 
I searched the web to credit the photographer, nope. Oldest v. was 2021. From Facebook.

An old friend from the Cazadero days, Marc Nassar, now living in Lisbon, posted a photo of a gorgeous globe mallow of sorts on Facebook. In his author photo, he wears a T-shirt that proclaims, in art we trust. He often posts images of pure beauty. 

So I often leave comments on his page, in part, to acknowledge the post, a habit of acknowledging the other, developed during the height of the pandemic when we were all so isolated from each other. But I also cannot resist the fleeting tangibility of beauty. (See Breakfast of campions.)

We stumbled upon each other on Facebook via old photos I had posted of a poetry reading, ca. 1998 at Marc’s house in Cazadero, of poets Mike Tuggle, Jim Dodge and Elizabeth Herron—this, after decades of isolation. It was something like 2 to 3° of separation, but Facebook often works in mysterious ways, telescoping time and distance into time present.

Breakfast of campions

One summer day around 32,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, an arctic ground squirrel stopped to sniff the Siberian wildflowers and nibbled on little white campions gone to seed. As the squirrel digested his breakfast on the banks on the River Kolyma, we will never know how his life abruptly ended. Did a flood cover his burrow? Did a mastodon tread on his home, grinding him into the earth? Too much ice to burrow through, come spring thaw?

Enter Time present: in 2007, the squirrel’s tiny body, buried 12 stories deep, still asleep in his burrow, was recovered from the melting permafrost with hundreds of seeds still in his gut. And a well stocked larder, a seed cache for the coming winter. Russian scientists sorted and counted the seeds.  

Years later, enter Svetlana from the Russian Academy of Sciences who tried her luck at resurrecting the seeds, she extracted placental tissue and nurtured the silene stenophylla embryos along. Sure, it was a longshot. Damned if the 32,000 year-old Methuselah seeds didn’t sprout and grow leaves. All 36 seeds sprouted and bloomed in profusion all at once like good little Soviets as if they were thrilled to be free from the permafrost at last. Not a false spring—like so many others.

Winter was finally over. The little white campion flowers bloomed for the first time in 32,000 years. The lab was perfumed with a spicy clove-cinnamon odor as they unfurled their finery and went about the business of pollination. Svetlana and her sable hair brush did the honors. A squirrel, a freaking carnation. A regeneration of the world’s oldest seeds. Talk about bloomin’ luck. It was like Lazarus rising from the dead. Nostrovya, they said.

I love this story of silene stenophylla, a.k.a. white campion. 

I remember finding bladder campion in Wengen, the Swiss Alps in 1972— it had little pink and white candy stripes on its bladder as if it was the frilly apron, or fancy bloomers worn by a volunteer nurse. I was lonely working as a waitress, in a hotel one summer, without a common language. So I turned to that of flowers. 

The campion, a silene, was similar to an Indian pink (actually a scarlet wildflower with pinked, or sheared decal edges), that I knew from West Marin. Gentian and chicory I recognized. Dandelions and buttercups, eiderweiss and pearly everlasting. But there were so many flowers I didn’t know, I was hooked. It got me interested in botany. 

That summer I collected, pressed and dried alpine flowers between the pages of old books. Though I was desperate for my mother tongue, I forfeited my novels weighted down under the legs of my bed, they had a more important job— preserving flowers. I didn’t know the names of most of the flowers—other than edelweiss and gentian, heather and clover. But the silly silene, a card-carrying member of the pink, or carnation family, (Caryophyllaceae) is what kicked off my interest.

Some say that the carnation stands for fascination, and others say for love, whether filial or maternal. Agape. According to one legend, white carnations grew from the Virgin Mary's tears as she wept for her son hanging on the cross. 

But the red ones were the eyes of the shepherd that Diana, the huntress, plucked from his head for throwing her off her game. Dianthus: either way, is the flower of the goddess. White for luck and pink for gratitude and red for revolution. I remember buying carnations from the street vendors in Red Square keeping their fragile blooms warm in little glass houses lit by candles, snow falling like feathers on the corpse of a failed experiment.

A few years ago, I was hiking in the deep canyons above Santa Barbara, headed towards the top of the ridge. I was winded and grateful for a chance to rest—I was on my hands and knees with nose pressed to the ground. Right in front of me, on the umpteenth switchback, was a plant I’d never seen before, pink, like a carnation, but thorny. 

It reminded me of those alpine campions. My memory wandered back to those good old days, hiking in the Swiss Alps, startling other hikers who found me on my hands and knees by the side of the trail, doing a faceplant. I later realized I was looking at a member of the Cichorieae (Dandelion) tribe. Santa Barbara wire lettuce. Not a campion, but close enough—call it convergent evolution. Even way back then, I was always looking for equivalencies. Call it simile. Or perhaps metaphor.

• Summer's End in the Alps
• USSR journal, Russian New Year’s, Eve, Scrying the future
• With thanks to Marc Nassar’s FB post.

True Quinces

Nascent fuzzy quince developing, Nicasio, ©Maureen Hurley 2018

The entire back yard of my friend, poet, Rebecca Morrison’s old Craftsman house in Sacramento was a vast impenetrable expanse of quince canes. She had no idea what to do with this advancing quince wicker thicket that looked like a bad case of Einstein’s hair on brillo pads and steroids. The rabbits and foxes, however, loved it, and called it home. 

The edible, or true quince of Asia Minor (with a range from Anatolia, to Armenia, Persia, and Iran), originally hailed from the Caucasus Mountains and the drought tolerant plant quickly spread to virtually all of the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia, North Africa and the Mediterranean, the Crimea, the Silk Road, and beyond.

Many old California homesteads often had quince thickets, planted alongside the prerequisite pears and apple orchards. When left to its own devices, the quince becomes a towering thicket, but it can be tamed, trained and pruned into a tree. Sort of. Their broad leathery leaves added vibrant colors to a fall landscape. Quince was also used as rootstock for finicky pear trees, and often went rogue if the pear tree died.

When I was a child, I loved the heavy perfumed odor of quince in late fall, picking the huge waxy fuzz-covered yellow orbs after the first frost, rubbing the fuzz off to make them shine like waxy golden suns, waiting for them to blett and ripen under my bed. Positively narcotic. 

I loved watching my grandmother canning quinces, mashing and straining the cooked pulp through layers of cheesecloth, which yielded a gorgeous blood-amber jelly laden with anthocyanins and tannins redolent with notes of apple, pear and citrus. Before the commercial invention of those little blue and white Knox gelatin packets, and commercial pectin such as Sure-jell (made with citrus), quince peels were used for their pugnacious pectin power to thicken canned fruit jams, jellies, and sauces.

Quinces, once considered food of the gods, associated with fertility and wedding feasts, became the infamous golden apples of discord in Classical literature, and associated with forbidden fruit in the Bible. They make scant appearance in modern literature, but there are occasional nods here and there in fairytales, and in medieval cookbooks. 

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's nurse said quinces will be eaten at the wedding feast. NURSE. They call for Dates and Quinces in the Pastrie. Alas, that did not end well, for the wedding party that never was. In the 1859 narrative poem, The Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti called quinces goblin fruits. Let’s hope that that Edward Lear’s owl and pussycat fared a little better as they dined most elegantly on slices of cooked quince.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with the runcible spoon; and hand and hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon, they danced by the light of the moon. —Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear 1871

Quinces are astringent, and most varieties cannot be eaten raw unless your mouth is impervious to malic acid compounds and bitter tannins. Not to mention, they’re loaded with antioxidants. They are puckery, and hard as chalk, they will make your teeth hurt. You cannot eat them raw. Your tongue will fall mute, you will gag, and the lining of your mouth may want to run off with some olive oil to salve its wounds. 

Quinces, once imbued with magical powers, were reputed to stave off the plague and Black Death. Needless to say, quince, with its medicinal cornucopia, was extremely popular in the British Isles and northern Europe. Quinces were used as a condiment and digestive for fatty meats, such as goose. (Try reading this recipe aloud for shitzngiggles. Hint: þe is the, that odd þ is a th sound, called a thorn.)

Sawse madame. Take sawge, persel, ysope and saueray, quinces and peeres, garlek and grapes, and fylle the gees þerwith; and sowe the hole þat no grece come out, and roost hem wel, and kepe the grece þat fallith þerof. Take galytyne and grece and do in a possynet. Whan the gees buth rosted ynouh, take hem of & smyte hem on pecys, and take þat þat is withinne and do it in a possynet and put þerinne wyne, if it be to thyk; do þerto powdour of galyngale, powdour douce, and salt and boyle the sawse, and dresse þe gees in disshes & lay þe sowe onoward. —from The Forme of Cury

Still-life of quinces by Vincent van Gogh (1887), Wikipedia 

There is a train of thought that the golden quince was the original symbol for the apple tree of Eden—as the boreal ancestral apple trees don’t thrive in warm climates. They need sub-alpine conditions in order to grow and set fruit. Which throws a spanner into the idea that those apples of original sin fame were really quinces in the Garden of Eden. Maybe Adam and Eve’s tastebuds weren’t fully developed. Or they had a really heavy frost to blett the fruit. Or maybe that’s why raw quinces are generally inedible. All that original sin hooey just to ward you off. You’ve been duly warned!

But wait, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, was an apple. The Bible tells us so. Nope. This is a rather long segue in what gets lost in translation: see, all those Greek references to apples, the ones mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, the famous apple tussle of Aphrodite, Athena and Hera, and the golden apples of discord—all need to be taken with a grain of salt as they are referring to these pome fruits, furry golden orbs, that is, quinces—not actual apples.

To keep abreast of the situation, the Greek word "μήλον" for apple—or any kind of globular, or round fruit (and apparently fat-bottomed girls) is malon, or melon. The word, "μήλον" also referred to fat sheep or fat goats. Pomaceous: anything-apple-shaped. Round. Fat. There must've been some seriously fat goats way back then. 

Sappho of Lesbos salaciously likened a young bride to a ‘sweet apple’ or (gluku’malon). Insert breast images here, or fat goats, and add a little Anthony Hopkins’ Silence of the Lambs slither sound with fava beans here. Here, have some chianti. Better yet, have some tinto riojo and gorgeous ruby hued membrillo quince paste with your manchego cheese from La Mancha. The Spanish word for quince paste, or cheese, membrillo comes from mimbre, for its wicker-like canes, and the word marmalade comes from the Portuguese marmalao.

According to Wikipedia, “The fruit was known to the Akkadians, who called it supurgillu; Arabic سفرجل al safarjal"quinces" (collective plural), as well as in Judea of Israel during the Mishnaic era where it was called perishin (פרישין collective plural, or sing. prish); quince flourished in the heat of the Mesopotamian plain, where apples did not. It was cultivated from an archaic period around the Mediterranean. Some ancients called the fruit "golden apples"The Greeks associated it with Cydonia (Kydonia) on Crete, as the "Cydonian pome" while the Romans called it strythion.

Enter Eris, the goddess of discord, who wasn’t invited to the wedding party hosted by Zeusy-baby. So she crashed it and brought an “apple.” The quince, a potent fertility drug, was Mother Earth’s wedding gift to Hera, literally food of the gods. Upon the quince was the inscription καλλίστῃ (kallistēi, "To/for the fairest one"), thus fomenting a brawl between three reigning goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—which ignited the Trojan War. Aphrodite won the beauty contest, by the way.

True quince was also used as an aromatic room freshener Wikipedia

Back to that harbinger of spring, those ornamental blood-red Japanese flowering pseudo-quinces in the garden, are not quinces at all, but they do look alike—except for their tiny serrated leaves. Quinces, that is, Cydonia oblonga, with their broad pear-like leaves, are often conflated with the three Southeast Asian ornamental flowering Pseudocydonia “quince” species in the genus Chaenomeles. 

Pseudo Japanese flowering “quince,”  Wikipedia

If you mixed up the two genera, don’t feel bad. The reason why I wrote this blog post is because a San Marcos native nursery man insisted that they were closely related species—nae, he called them mere varieties. As in one species. Since my childhood memories were so closely associated with true quince, I had to set him straight. I tend to get cranky when people don’t know the difference between genus and species. Especially a nurseryman. May you eat raw quince.

See, real quinces are orphans, they are their own sole genus and species, no close cousins whatsoever to speak of.  When you’re the only species in your genus, that’s something to crow about, evolutionarily speaking. It’s either good news, or really bad news. As in the last of your kind.

The large five-petaled flowers of the true quince, like showoff apple blossoms, tend to be white, or veined with a pale pink blush—kind of like the Chinese pseudo flowering quince. They even have similar looking fruit to the pseudo-quince. Five seeds in a star pattern like an apple or a pear cut crosswise. Blame it on a common ancestor of the Maleae tribe in the Rosaceae family. Call it convergent evolution. A divine model for a divine fruit. Not to mention the Judgement of Paris. You do know that Helen bribed Paris with a quince.

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  True quince blossoms, Manfred Heyde Wikipedia

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! A daffodil for Dewi Sant, photos

I'm not sure how the tradition first began, but about 40 years ago, daffodils, sold at a buck a bulb, were planted along Sonoma County roadsides to raise money for cancer research (the tradition may have begun in Canada as early as1965.) However it started, it was a wild success story. And daffodils have been used to raise money and promote cancer awareness ever since. Because daffodils have a chemical, esemastine, that kills breast cancer cells, they have become an international symbol of hope. (Narcissus pseudonarcissus, Amaryllidaceae family, are native to Northern Europe). 

In Sonoma County it has become a tradition that when someone dies of cancer, family and friends plant daffodils in remembrance—like the transplanted Mexican tradition of roadside memorials for car crash victims. The two traditions are beginning to merge in West Marin—shrines with la virgin de Guadalupe, trinkets and toys—even baby shoes—now include a stand of daffodils or narcissi. Most North Bay county roadsides are a riot of daffodils—a living reminder for those who have died. 

In defense of California Bay Laurel

Today’s rant is brought to you in defense of bay trees. On a friend’s Facebook page, someone was trash-talking California bay laurel trees, saying, among other things, they were an invasive species and should be completely eradicated. Well, to say I lost my mind, was an understatement—more like ballistic. He was confusing our native bay tree with the Mediterranean species, in the same family, with the same common name. So was everyone else on the thread. This is why we have Latinate names, folks—family, genus, species. That’s FGS, fergawdsakes.

I wrote: Well, I see it’s time to pull out the big guns and invoke the Latin names here. Most Californians have always called Umbellularia californica a bay tree, the Mediterranean cousin was also called bay laurel. Then someone a little too wordy for his own good, decided to call it a longish mouthful—California Bay Laurel—to clarify the name and distinguish it from the Mediterranean Laurus nobilis, aka sweet bay laurel, noble laurel, true laurel, Greek laurel—thus confusing most of the people most of the time.

I was on a roll. During the Miocene era, the entire Mediterranean basin was covered with lush bay laurel. Even the Sahara. In ancient Greece, the plant was called Daphne, after a river nymph Apollo had the hots for, who was turned into a bay laurel tree by her father. Misdirected love is why the bay is an evergreen. Now sweetbay, or bay laurel only survives in small pockets at high altitudes in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, so it’s considered rare as love.

Back to our bay tree. There is only one sole species of Umbellularia. During the Cenozoic era, aka the age of mammals, there were three other Lauraceae relatives in California, Nectandra, Ocotea, aka sweetwood, and Persea—ancient avocados. Bay nut pulp, if eaten young, taste a lot like its avocado cousin. The persea, with its giant seed, had a unique seed distribution system, giant sloths. 

The giant sloths, aka the Lestodon, were the only mammals who had intestines big enough to pass the giant avocado pits. Lesser mammals croaked from terminal constipation. So when the giant sloths, who slowly ate ancient avocados went exstinky, the ancestral avocados’ shinola propagation game plan was up to your neck in schitt creek without a sphincter of hope. See, the only way the Persea coalingensis could propagate from seed was when the giant sloths took a giant dump. Geologist Garry Hayes said joshua trees were also a favored snack.

“The original avocado found in the area now designated California can be related to prehistoric times, namely the middle Eocene and Pliocene epochs which have been determined by geologists to be approximately 10 to 60 million years ago. The history of these progenitors of the modern avocado and close botanical relatives in our current Persea species is recorded in fossil remains embedded in rocky outcroppings and in formations exposed comparatively recently by the work of man as he sought gold in California. ...Persea praelinque, P. pseudo-carolinensis, P. coalingensis were scattered throughout California in prehistoric times and are represented today only by botanical relatives found in Sonoran Mexico. —from Prehistoric Avocados in California

Adds a whole new level of meaning to gold digger. The persea pit could only sprout after a dark, wild journey through the giant sloth’s intestine—a weird, ill-fated symbiosis. Needless to say both tree and sloth went by the wayside. Civit coffee move over. I, for one, could’ve survived life without knowing the circumference of a giant sloth’s asshole. No shit, Sherlock. I guess I should say, Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Let’s talk about overpriced avocado toast, pass the guacamole, please. You do know that avocado means testicle in Náhuatl, right? I’ll let you guess what guacamole means.

Settlers used our native bay leaves for seasoning—they’re much spicier and pungent than their sweetbay relatives in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. I used the last of Nevada County poet laureate, Molly Fisk’s piquant bay laurel leave wreath in the turkey soup. It was resting on its laurels in the back seat of her car.... It’s a long story. Chris Olander is the current Nevada County poet laureate, in case you’re wondering. Just don’t confuse wordsmith Olander with oleander sometimes used as a bay leaf laurel crown, though they do look alike, as oleander is very toxic, but Chris is a long, cool drink of water.

California bay was an important food source for Native peoples who ate the pulp of young bay nuts, roasted and powdered the mature nut, used the young leaves as a green, as a tea. Deer adore young bay shoots—high in protein. Mature leaves were used as a seasoning, a medicine, and an insecticide to get rid of lice, and to keep grubs from their acorn granaries. Squirrels, jays, and rodents like the nuts, and woodrats also use bay leaves to keep their dens pest free. No more fleas.

But I digress, the noble laurel, from whence we get the word and the shrubbery to crown for our poets Laureate. Joy Harjo is our current/third term US Poet Laureate), and the Nobel prize, not to mention those laurels for ancient Greeks to rest upon, is a shrub, a small tree—not the big monster tree that our native bays can become. Swedish chemist who invented TNT, Alfred Nobel, cleverly coined the Nobel Prize, which was also a pun on his name. Dynamite! 

The  largest bay tree in the world is in Mendocino, an official Big Tree. The Big Tree on Graton Road in Sonoma County is at least 600 years old. Sonoma County has the highest concentration of CA bays in the world. There’s a monster tree in Santa Clara, but it split in two. I know of another monster in Las Gallinas/Lucas Valley (photo—can you find West Marin poet Brian Kirven in the tree? He’s six feet tall, and he should be a poet laureate).

I said to the FB poster, Please don’t call our native bay tree a generic laurel tree, that’s another series of shrubbery altogether. All those other laurels by any other name, other than the noble laurel, are loaded with cyanide. Especially the English laurel. The California bay is endemic to California, meaning it grows nowhere else in the world except here, in riparian zones wherever both types of sequoias were found—the coasts and the Sierra foothills to 5000 feet. And it likes to grow with oak trees.

There are a few bay groves in southwestern Oregon too, where they inexplicably call it Oregon myrtle. Another non-California common name is headache tree. Early pioneer settlers called it pepperwood because of the odor. Most of the Native names are lost; in Yuki, it is called pōl’-cum ōl. In Humboldt County, near Weott, Avenue of the Giants, there’s a wide spot in the road, a hamlet that changed its name to Pepperwood from Barkdull. A town swept away in the 1955 flood, and finished off in 1964. But the name persists. All that’s left today is a giant corn cob monument commemorating the spot where the village of Pepperwood once stood on the Eel River floodplain.

Who remembers the Pepperwood Restaurant on Mark West Creek in Santa Rosa? Sort of a bland Zim’s joint. The nearby Pepperwood Preserve was donated to the Academy of Sciences in 1979, and turned into a preserve in 2005.The old Knight’s Valley cattle ranches, last owned by the Bechtels, were once part of the 1843 Rancho Mallacomes land grant. Before that it was Wappo country, but it curiously doesn’t have massive bay tree stands—mostly oak woodlands burned by myriad wildfires. There are two small isolated pockets of bays in Tacoma and BC, so California bay laurel may have been once more widespread. Or someone planted them.

Though baywood is terrible to use as a main source of firewood as it’s too wet, it hisses like a snake, and makes a huge sooty mess in the stovepipe, it’s an excellent source of wood for fine carving, and it’s also a superb tonewood, sought out by luthiers. Great guitar backs. During the 1970s, I was in a southwestern Oregon art gallery admiring a lovely hand-carved wooden salad bowl, and the propieter made a big fuss about how rare myrtlewood burl was. I was quite miffed when I realized he was talking about baywood. Oh, for fucksakes, California bays are common as weeds. 

The unnamed FB poster further maligned bay trees saying they were forest thugs choking and strangling other trees. He said it would better to eradicate them all. By that point, my ears were steaming. I must’ve been channeling Edward Abbey who said, "It is no longer sufficient to describe the world of nature. The point is to defend it." 

I said, Bays don’t have an invasive root system that kills other trees. But they do grow big and create a huge root crown, or lignotuber base—a kind of tree larder—so they can regenerate after a fire. Their dead leaves release termines, like oak leaves release tannin, which does discourage undergrowth—but they are not the bullies. Once again, here we are, with our myopic three-second soundbyte masquerading as critical thinking skills.

Yes, bay and tanoak are host to Sudden Oak Death, the bay is wounded, but doesn’t die from it, however to the tanoak, it is nearly always lethal. SOD is a waterborn pathogen introduced from China via imported rhododendrons, the bay did not introduce it to oaks, the rhododendrons did. Blame that Marin nursery that imported diseased rhodies.

The fungus, Phytophthora ramorum, similar to the potato blight, is transmitted by water, and well, bays like water, and to make things more complicated, bays and oaks often prefer to grow with each other. It’s a symbiotic thing. Bays and oaks are BFFs People maligning and madly killing bay trees in order to to save the oaks, are sadly misinformed. SOD harms bay trees too, leaving spots on bay leaves. The pathogen is waterborn. Might as well try and stop the rain. Speaking of which, we could really use some rain to end this mega-drought.

I prefer to call it a bay tree than by any other name. I’ll put my laurels down now. Step away slowly from the keyboard. Now.

 

There are still a few massive heritage bay trees in California. And from Graton/Occidental Sonoma County we have:

That massive lignotumor suggests the crown is not first growth. 

Car botanizing, Hick's Valley, West Marin

Hick's Valley, West Marin. Car botanizing enroute to work on the back-backroads of home. All this beauty and I can't even leave my car. I slammed on the brakes and flipped a uiee for this one. And my camera is on its last legs, er, lens.... autofocus is going, among other things—dirt inside the lens, unintentional blind spots create solar flares. I eke out photos with a wing and a prayer as I go, each one might be the last. I got lucky this time. So beautiful, it almost hurts. Nowhere near as intense as the SoCal poppy blooms, but impressive nonetheless. We have more non-native grasses to contend with. The area used to be laden with vernal pools, so on the other side of the rise are vast swaths of meadowfoam blazoning the hillsides. Where to even begin, California poppies, sky lupine, owl’s clover, cream cups, buttercups, mallow, popcorn flower, aka snow on the mountain, grass nuts, red dock?, yarrow in the distance. Tomorrow, the hills will be a little less green, a fleeting moment. I am reminded of Robert Duncan’s 

the 

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

When I was a young and uninformed poet, Robert Duncan always included me in readings, encouraged me to keep on writing.

I had been ogling a deluxe Stabilo pencil set for over a year, it arrived all the way from England in a cherrywood box, just When the coronavirus struck. Some Friday the 13th. My mind was alternately  elastic, or  a black hole—expanding and contracting—leaving me lost on alien shores. I couldn’t make art. I had the attention span of a newt. The only thing that saved me was driving the back roads to my job. I went the long way home whenever possible. Botanizing from the car. 

This tree, and rock became my anchor. My salvation. I watched the greenery meld into a rainbow fest of flowers unfold. First on the scene were the yellow buttercups and creamcups, then orange poppies, magenta mallow, and owl’s clover, indigo lupine, and purple ookow. Meanwhile, the mountain watched the passage of the season. In this way I began to find my out of the horror of what it is, and what will be for a long time coming. This meadow, my salvation. —Maureen Hurley

the 

On the other side of that hill you can see where it’s been plowed as the meadowfoam follows the tracks of the plow from previous years past makes for an interesting braided effect of yellow and green. And now it’s blooming by the fire station. If you look carefully in the upper left corner, you can see  thin blue band of reservoir just below the meadowfoam.

Guerrilla photobombing the wildflowers

To see the flowers go to Facebook

Easter Monday: I was botanizing on backroads while driving back & forth to work today (I’m a care provider.) Most pix are from Nicasio, or Hick’s Valley, West Marin. Since I can’t park the car—or risk getting a ticket, these are all stolen roadside shots. Guerrilla photography at its worst—no time to compose or focus. And my camera is losing its ability to focus so I snap madly & hope I get something. I was pretty numb by Easter Sunday, with SiP, is sing my family, and taking photos of wildflowers helped pull me from the darkness. I mean, who can resist a wild goose guarding his buttercup kingdom....


“The true and durable path into and through experience involves being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.” —Seamus Heaney – born this day. My old friend’s last words were “Noli timere.” Go raibh maith agat, mo chroidhe. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.
More pix here of Sonoma County flowers

Wild Apples

The apples are good from this feral volunteer that chose to grow on a rocky outcrop

An otherwise lovely story on apples in The Guardian that appeared last May, claimed that all apples came from Kazakhistan. My immediate knee-jerk reaction was that the statement was wrong on so many levels.

The geographic origin of the apple can be traced to modern-day Kazakhstan but the Romans are the ones that popularized it the most. Gardens: why we need to protect Kazakhstan’s wild apples

And the more I delved into that sentence, the more wrong it seemed. My second thought was: What were the Romans doing in Kazakhstan, anyway? Did I miss that history lesson? And what about the native apples of Asia? Merely hearsay? The chase was on.

I agree we need to protect Kazakhstani apples, but the birthplace of the modern apple is Central Asia, specifically the Altai and the Tian Shan Mountains—which includes not only Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Xinjiang in Northwest China—in other words, the Silk Road. The sentence should have scanned: "modern apples." And my hackles wouldn’t have been raised. (See the Smithsonian article for a more accurate history.)

Despite popular belief, a species of wild apples (Malus sylvestris) were already in the British Isles long before the Romans arrived (they just brought bigger, better apples). Circa 98 AD, Roman historian Gaius Tacitus reported that the Briton Druid Ovates carried silver apple boughs with bronze, silver, or gold bells. And in Ireland, Otherworld apples also feature prominently in Echtrae Chonnlai which was recorded in the 8th or 9th c., but it's a much older tale. And in The Song of Wandering Aengus, Yeats made famous the lines lifted from Irish folklore, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. 

But the wild European crabapple was native to the British Isles long before the Romans or Christianity reached its shores. In fact, there is evidence that wild apples grew wild in Ireland and Britain during the Neolithic era. It’s a Northern Hemisphere circumpolar boreal plant along with raspberries, salmonberries and roses, buttercups, crucíferos plants, hazels, and vaccinium species including cranberries and blueberries.

The word apple is embedded in many insular place-names that predate Roman occupation in the British Isles. Anglesey, the Isle of Apples, Avalon. Anglesey (Ynys Môn) was sometimes called Afallach, or rich in apples. Geoffrey of Monmouth called the island Insule Ponorum, or the island of the apples. In Immram Brain, a síd woman gives Bran a silver branch in white bloom—a cróeb dind abaill a hEmain, or ‘a branch from the apple-tree of Emain. Emain Macha was sometimes called Emain Ablach. –The Apple in Early Irish Narrative.

When I was living in the Ukraine, I was struck by how similar the word apple яблоко yablacko in Russian is to the Irish (genitive) Ablach, clearly a shared Indo-European ancestry.

From Old Irish uball, ubull (Scottish Gaelic ubhal), from Proto-Celtic *abalom (compare Welsh afal), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ébōl (compare English apple, Lithuanian obuolỹs, Russian я́блоко (jábloko), Serbo-Croatian jȁbuka). —Wictionary

And the Celtic apple of the day would've been a quasi-domestic relative of the wild European crabapple Malus sylvestris, aka the small forest apple, not the ancestor of the modern apple, Malus sieversii (native to the mountains of Turkey and Kazakhstan).

The symbol of the apple wasn't necessarily a tradition borrowed from the Middle East. Or the mid-way point to the Far East. Greek historical references to apples predate Roman cultivation, and the role of the apple is central to Bronze Age Celtic lore. Even Homer's Odyssey refers to apples. Then there's the apple tussle of Aphrodite, Athena and Hera to consider. You know, like, Who's the most beautiful goddess of all, and the sour apples of discord? (Those apples may have been quinces, native to the Caucasus.) Fairytale heroine Snow White chokes on an apple and falls asleep for a very long time.

The Greek word "μήλον" for apple or any kind of globular, or round fruit, and fat-bottom girls—is malon, or melon. Think generic. Sort of like asking for a Coke and getting orange soda. In Homeric times, "μήλον" also referred to sheep or goats (my mind wanders to that tree of goats photo). Pomaceous: anything-apple-shaped. Round. There must've been some seriously fat goats. Poet Sappho of Lesbos likened a young bride to an ‘sweet apple’ (gluku’malon). Better than being compared to a fat goat.

When does the word apple enter into the English translation of the Bible as THE depicted forbidden fruit? Bede? (late 7th c.) Aldred? (10th c.) John Wycliffe? (late 14th c.) King James? What was the Latin word: fructus, or malum? Or was it the more drought-tolerant quince? (The Irish monk-scribes would've been reading the Bible bits in Greek and Latin.)

There were certainly native European crab apples in the British Isles since the last Ice Age, but the problem is even thornier than that. Get this: apples, indigenous to cold northern climates, weren't even a Levant fruit. Too dry and too hot. Even way back then.  (They're now carefully propagated in the Golan Heights.) The so-called "apple" of the Holy Land was most likely a sturdy, heat-tolerant quince, popular in the Levant. The apple would've been an unknown fruit in the Middle East during Biblical times. There goes the old Tree of Knowledge metaphor.

I also discovered that the word "apple" was used as a generic term for ALL globular (foreign) fruit and some vegetables (not berries or nuts), as late as the 17th century. Tomatoes were called love apples, cucumbers and potatoes, earth apples. Even oranges were referred to as apples. Because they were ROUND!

The two words for apple and evil in Latin are also a tongue-in-cheek pun: Eve ate a malum (apple—or something fat and round), and became mālum (evil). The Arabic for apple is tuffah, Hebrew is tappuach, from the Aramaic. But it was probably a borrowing, as the so-called apple of the Holy Land was most likely a quince. The apple would've been an unknown fruit in the Middle East during Biblical times.

Also, it's a western European concept to associate apples with the Tree of Knowledge. (When? Probably since the late Middle Ages. The apple is depicted in art during the Renaissance.) So, the much maligned apples were not necessarily considered to be the forbidden fruit during the 6th - 8th centuries. 

It's a muddled idea, at best. Or perhaps it's all muddled old road apples.

The modern apple, Malus pumila, or M. domestica, related to the wild forest apples, the Asian Malus sieversii, and Malus silvestris seems to have had a wide geographic distribution from the British Isles to Central Asia, and then some, and there are no less than four other malus species in North America. It's probably a circumpolar Ice Age relic holarctic plant species like vaccinium.

So, if apples came from Kazakhstan, how in the bleeding blue blazes did they arrive in North America before Columbus, or, say, Lief Erickson? And don't tell me Johnny Appleseed, hero of cider makers everywhere, planted them all. He did sow the Northwest Territories with apple trees. Since he used apple seeds, gawd only knows what wild varieties sprouted since apples don't seed true to form.

In fact, crab apples are also native to the entire Northern Hemisphere. (I had previously learned that apples were brought to the New World by colonists, and scholars still erroneously note European apples originally came by way of Kazakhstan, or China, along with the peach, which really messes with the myriad apple references embedded within Medieval Celtic mythology.) 
 
I am fascinated by the evolution of the apple. With the streamlining of marketable apples, we're down to a handful of tasteless eating apples with names like Fuji, Pink Lady, and Gala. Our Italian neighbor, Mary Bianchi, in Forest Knolls, had cooking apples (monstrous sour things), plus a variety of eating apples including striped winesaps, Gravensteins, and also bitter cider apples.

"Hard apple cider was hugely popular in early America, and cider vinegar was an essential home ingredient." According to Oregonian heirloom apple hunter, David Benscoter, “It is estimated that of the 17,000 named apple varieties originating in North America, only around 4,000 still exist today." —Apple detective finds five more apple varieties thought to be extinct...

According to most definitions, the main difference between a crab apple and an edible, domestic apple is the size of the fruit (and the sourness). But it's more complicated than that. Farmers and cider-makers traditionally waited for the bitter fruit laden with tannin to be kissed and sweetened by the first frost before harvest (similar to bletting).

The familiar edible apples did not grow in North America before the arrival of European settlers. Old World apple trees became established in the New World from the trees and seeds that Dutch and English emigrants brought from Europe. As legend has it, Johnny Appleseed profoundly influenced the spread of apples in North America by sowing them everywhere he traveled, but he was just one of many pioneers who planted apple seeds in the new territories. The original cultivated apple trees also became established naturally through seeds dispersed by birds and mammals. Old World Apples. [For more on Old World apple species, see also "Old-Time Apples," THE WORLD & I, October 1989, p. 388]

Before European apples were introduced to the New World, crab apples were native to North America. Although less familiar than commercial apples, these native American species still grow in the wild. 

In North America, there's Malus ioensis, or prairie crabapple (ioensis refers to Iowa). The most common variety, Malus ioensis var. ioensis, is native to the prairies of the upper Mississippi Valley. Another variety, Malus ioensis var. texana, or the Texas crabapple, is native to a tiny region of central Texas. There's even a Southern crabapple, Malus angustifolia. Then there's Malus fusca, native to western North America from Alaska, with a range from British Columbia, to northwestern California. Flowers are white or pale pink. 

According to a blogpost, Native American Apple, plant taxonomists may quibble over the number of apples native to North America, but most agree that there are four major species. The three eastern species are quite similar to each other. But the lone western species is a bird of a different feather. The western species shares similarities with wild apples native to China, while the three eastern species seem to have Middle East connections—thought to have split off early in the evolution of the genus Malus.

There are an estimated 25-47 different species of Malus worldwide. This number fluctuates greatly due to the ease in which species of Malus are able to hybridize with each other, making the process of differentiation between the species very difficult. Of this number, only four species are native to North America. These species are Malus fusca, Malus coronaria, Malus angustifolia and Malus ioensis. Crab Apple Trees Native to North America.

But worldwide, wild crab apples have become endangered, due to farmers preferring to grow commercial table apples to cider apples (cider crab apple varieties include Foxwhelp, Kingston Black, Yarlington Mill and Dabinett.)

In northern California, there was a wild crab apple tree in the gulch across the way from us where my grandmother used to gather the apples after the first frost. I loved eating them. I never considered it a native species. The diminutive apples were dense, with golden yellow pulp, sweet, but with a bitter astringent afterbite. It was probably a Pacific crab apple or Oregon crab apple. One fall, our new neighbor, in an attempt to tame the land, viciously hacked it down with a chainsaw, and we mourned its loss.

Now, decades later, after I learned that the old crab apple tree wasn't an escapee from some farmer's orchard by way of pooping birds, but a native species, I doubly mourn its loss.