THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT l
3
I scan this chaos of colors and inhale the fecund
scents, pausing to take a deep breath before chugging up through wild apple habitat unlike that of any
other place on Earth. Multi-stemmed apple trees
begin growing at the base of the ridge I am ascending and continue up to another taller ridge behind it,
and another behind it, nearly all the way to the crest
of the Tian Shan range that separates Kazakhstan
from China. There are trees other than wild pears,
apricots, and apples within these forests, but I can’t
climb too far from one fruit tree before running into
another, its fruit hanging like so many ornaments on
a holiday tree.
An earlier traveler through the region, one Victor
Vitkovich, proclaimed these naturally occurring
groves to be “a marvelous garden where apples and
pears look down on you from the trees and beg to be
eaten.” I oblige, sampling the sweet and the sour, the
mellow and the musky, the sugary and the stringent
fruit all around me.
I gained entry to these forests—some of them now
protected by the Kazakh government—through the
good graces of two Kazakh conservationists, Aimak
Dzangaliev and Tatiana Salova, both associated with
the Main Botanical Garden in the city of Almaty, less
than an hour’s drive from here. It would not be hyperbole to call nonagenarian Aimak Dzangaliev the
Asian counterpart to Johnny Appleseed; indeed, that
American folk hero might have felt humbled by
Dzangaliev’s prodigious work with apples, had the
two been contemporaries. This work has earned him
praise from the likes of N. A. Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, Michael Pollan, author of The
Botany of Desire, and The Book of Apples coauthor Joan
Morgan, who has tasted nearly every apple variety in
the world.
Aimak Dzangaliev >rst considered devoting his
life to apples in 1929, and as of the summer of 2006,
he was still actively working to study and conserve
and use the diversity of wild fruits in his homeland.
He credits his wife, Tatiana, several decades his junior, with ensuring his good health and vigor by having provided him with several kinds of wild apples
every day since they were married. Wearing a >re
engine–red dress that exclaims I love apples! by its
very intensity, the rosy-cheeked Tatiana shares with
her husband an awe for the overwhelming diversity
of a single wild apple species native to Central Asia:
C ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC ÇC
Malus sieversii. Tatiana marvels at the variety of
shapes, sizes, and colors of apples found within a
sixty-mile radius of their home. “Look at them,” she
sighs, scanning the season’s harvest. “There are
apples the size of a large marble to that of a small
plum; some are very glossy, others are somewhat
dull; their skins are solid red, yellow green, or mottled russet . . . ”
Within this region of Kazakhstan, Dzangaliev and
Salova have catalogued more than >fty-six wild forms
of Malus sieversii, twenty-six of which might be called
the basic wild ecotypes, with the other thirty being
natural or anciently semidomesticated hybrids. That
is scienti>c shorthand for saying that for thousands
of years, forest dwellers have in?uenced the diversity
of these “wild forests,” selecting ?avors, textures, and
qualities that persist in self-seeding or feral trees to
this day. But whenever I ask Dzangaliev or Salova
how much of this diversity they themselves have discovered and described, they defer credit to another
scientist—Aimak’s teacher and hero, Nikolay Vavilov,
who spent a few days in the region with Aimak when
the latter was just a teenager.
Vavilov is widely regarded as the world’s greatest
plant explorer, for he made over 250,000 seed, fruit,
and tuber collections on >ve continents. Tatiana credits him with >rst recognizing that Kazakhstan was
the center of origin and diversity for apples. “It is not
surprising,” she concedes, “that when Vavilov >rst
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.”
