When Vavilov came back to Leningrad in November of 1929, he worked for another year and a half on a monograph entitled, The wild relatives of fruit trees of the Asian part of the USSR and Caucasus, and the problem of the origin of fruit trees. Three-quarters of a century later, Professor Dzangaliev, his wife Tatiana Salova, and their friend P. M. Turekhanova completed the modern sequel of Vavilov’s Central Asia survey. In it, they concluded that within Kazakhstan’s flora of six thousand species, there are at least 157 species that are either the direct precursors or close wild relatives of domesticated crops. They found that ninety prevent of all cultivated fruits of the world’s temperate zones were historically found in Kazakhstan’s forests, confirming its status — first suggested by Vavilov — as a center of origin for many of the planet’s major fruit tree crops.
When I first stepped into these forests with one of Dr Dzangaliev’s co-workers, I had to pinch myself, for rather than oaks or beeches or aspens or pines dominating the vegetation, we were surrounded by decades-old trees whose branches were loaded down with fully-ripened apples and pears. The forest floor was littered with fruit, some half-eaten by wildlife, others, along trails, showing signs of being sampled by local farmers, who tend to manage and protect the trees with the best fruit. We were barely an hour beyond the city limits of Almaty, and had crossed through dozens of commercial fruit orchards on the lower ridges edging the valley before we entered these steeply-sloped semi-managed forests. Our driver took us up a gravel road that crisscrossed a small stream several times before we reached a locked gate through which only military vehicles could pass toward the Chinese border.
There, amidst the other trees were a bewildering variety of apple-bearing trees and shrubs, all belonging to the native species, Malus sieversii, which Aimak Dzangaliev and Tatiana Salova had not only researched but had eaten day after day for decades. Tatiana still marvels at the diversity of forms that can be found within a single habitat:
“Look at them: there are apples from the size of a large marble to that of a small plum; some are very glossy, others are somewhat dull; their skins can be red, yellow-green, or mottled red. It is not surprising that when Vavilov came to Kazakhstan to look at plants he was so amazed. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow as a forest. That is one reason why he stated that this is probably where the apple was born, this was its birthing grounds.”
Within the range of Malus sieversii in this region of Kazakhstan, Dzangaliev and Salova have catalogued more than 56 wild forms of apples, twenty-six of which might be called the basic wild ecotypes, with another thirty being natural or anciently semi-domesticated hybrids. Some are on the remaining wild edges of extensive valleys that have been intentionally-planted with European cultivars of domesticated apples. Tatiana Salova finds this worrisome, because the balance has been tipped, with wild apple habitat declining and domesticated apple plantations increasing in area:
“Only here can we find cultivated and wild trees crossing, but the high number of cultivated trees is now swamping the wild remnants. Dr Dzangaliev and I are very worried that there are few places left anymore where wild trees grow nowadays without being surrounded by cultivated trees.”
Some of the wild trees have been lost to the expansion of commercial apple orchards, but most have found their space usurped by urban expansion, which has paved or built over many places that formerly offered ideal conditions for the growth of apple trees. From a series of apple forest maps which Dzangaliev, Salova and their colleagues have elaborated over the five decades, it is clear that between 70 and 80 percent of the apple forests in the mountains immediately surrounding Almaty have been lost since 1960. At that time, the human population of Almaty was about 456,000, but by the year 2000, it had more than doubled to 1,140,000 inhabitants. Since 1964, the land area in high density residential use within the Metro Almaty region has increased 125 percent, with condominiums and large hotels taken over lands formerly lined with apple tree plantings.
These trends have brought considerable sorrow to Aimak Dzangaliev:
“It was bad enough that a million wild apple trees disappeared during the war,” Professor Dzangaliev said somberly, referring to World War II, when he himself lost several of his toes due to frostbite. He sighed, and went on, wringing his long, beautiful hands.
“On the Chinese border near Jungar, the Soviet government used the apples to make vodka and jam, but then destroyed all the trees, burning them as firewood. As Kazakh people today, we are on the edge of another such abyss of genetic loss among our apples. That is why I have written a report to the Kazakh Commission of the Environment noting that less than thirty percent of the original stands of apples remain, and others will be lost if we don’t do anything to protect them. I pointedly ask them, ‘Do you want to destroy the tree shown on the national emblem of Kazakhstan?’.” [1]
Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.
Notes:
- Difficult one, this. The Emblem of Kazakhstan does not, as far as I can tell, sport a tree, apple or otherwise. But perhaps there is another that does? [↩]
