Apples & People
‘The Apple World Map’
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
