Apples & People explores the astonishing story of the apple through forty-six Apple Stories. Connecting its diverse history to humanity and culture. Based upon a specially commissioned Apple World Map which traces the network of stories from the ancient world to the present day. This online programme and associated social media reveals just how significant and iconic this humble fruit has become.
The digital exhibition applesandpeople.org.uk was launched at the beginning of 2021 in response to the pandemic and will cease at the end of 2026.
Please take a moment over these next few months to look again at the stories, articles and images on the website and wonder at the extraordinary multi-faceted relationship between people and apples.
With the curtain falling on the Apples & People exhibition programme at the end of this year we are celebrating the artists who have contributed their work over the last five years.
“The humble fruit is a symbol of mundane human living as well as global connectedness between peoples, and between people and nature.”
With the curtain falling on the Apples & People exhibition programme at the end of this year, what could be more fitting for the last substantive post on the Journal of Apples than to share the beginning of a play from the pen of celebrated dramatist Caryl Churchill where contemplation about an apple, and how someone might choose to depict it, becomes an illustrative metaphor for loss, love, longing and regret, the theme of the ensuing drama.
‘What If If Only’ premiered in 2021, the year that we launched Apples & People, and we are thrilled to have Caryl Churchill’s permission to share the thought-provoking opening monologue, kindly recorded for us by accomplished actress Abigail McKern.
Please take a moment to listen, and listen again, to this superb reading of superb writing, which we will also share on Instagram.
This is Apples & People’s swansong.
During the last five years of Apples & People we have showcased apple art from around the world, art which has taken many different forms.
Much time and dedication is undertaken to find, propagate, care for, and record apple varieties that are no longer commercially viable or had local resonance, with heritage collections worldwide, often volunteer-run, aiming to preserve the world’s richly diverse population of apple varieties. This article looks at how one such local collection is helping to protect old cider apple varieties by gaining National Plant Collection® status, and international efforts to understand the vast diversity of apples, their provenance, and interrelationships.
This specially commissioned map chronicles the apple’s journey across time, geography and cultures, illustrating some of the ways that this humble fruit has enriched human existence and how human care and understanding of nature has helped to shape apples today.
The hand painted watercolour map was commissioned from UK based illustrator Helen Cann. This map forms the basis for the stories told by Apples & People that each further explore an aspect of humanity’s close connection with the apple and together form a narrative of this astonishing relationship.
Helen Cann – The first wild apple forests were actually found high in the Tian Shan, sometimes known as the Heavenly Mountains, of Kazakhstan. Weary travellers took those apples for food and to trade along the Silk Routes as far as the Middle East and Europe. Here, ancient Sumerians, Romans, Greeks and Persians began to cultivate them – building orchards, tending saplings and spreading the practice of grafting.
The ages of European colonisation and exploration took the apple further – to the African, Australian and American continents. Russia, China and Japan developed their own apple varieties; the ‘Antonovka’ apple. As the world industrialised and travel became easier, different apple varieties were spread around the world and trading apples became big business. Now, many of these countries export globally, some to their original colonisers.
46 ‘Apple Stories’ have been published on key dates between January 2021 and June 2023
Paul Cézanne - Still Life with Apples, circa 1878, oil on canvas. Copyright © The Provost and Fellows of King's College, Cambridge, UK
Part of an apple genome sequence © Nicola Busatto
Frederic Leighton - Garden of Hesperides (1892) © Courtesy National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery
Gentleman of Genius, Thomas Andrew Knight, Herefordshire’s vanguard of pomology
Idun and Brage, 1846, oil on canvas by Nils Jakob Blommér, Malmö Art Museum, Sweden
Bramley Apple Story
The Gangines of the Mappa Mundi
Grafting: Giving Nature a Helping Hand
We would like you to help us celebrate Apples & People by posting a picture of yourself or a friend holding an apple in a meaningful way.
Together, we will create a new apple gallery on Instagram: #peopleholdingapples
Throughout time, the apple has been adopted as an artistic device to portray human emotion. We would like you to explore and share how you would choose to hold an apple in a way that expresses a feeling.
1) Take a photo or photos of someone or some people holding an apple or apples in their hand
2) Post on your Instagram Account (write something about the image if you wish)
3) Add the hashtag #peopleholdingapples to the post
4) Tag the post with @applesandpeople
Portrait of Billy Apple® 1965 photographed by Jerrold Schatzberg.
Courtesy of the Billy Apple® Archive.
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What If If Only
Home, JournalApples & People has been all about using the best art to help tell stories about apples and show how vital people have been in selecting and celebrating the rich variety of apples that are enjoyed around the world today.
Savouring Old Apple Varieties
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Little Apple
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