A (crab) apple a day

They may be too tart to eat, but crab apples can be made into all sorts of good things, from jellies to salves, and may even have been Adam and Eve's forbidden fruit, says Ian Morton

THE Book of Genesis describes it merely as 'the fruit of the tree of knowledge', but, when it came to identifying it, the apple was the natural choice for allegorical depictions of humanity's fall from grace. Ancient traditions abounded with tales of apples, notably golden ones, offering temptation and disaster. Scholarly pedants later suggested alternatives― grape, fig, olive, pomegranate, banana, orange, even mushroom and wheat. However, if the apple really was the culprit in the Garden of Eden, botanical evidence points not to a crisp and succulent orchard fruit, but to its wild ancestor, the crab apple. Its flesh would have been, to quote American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, 'sour enough to make ajay scream'. Hardly worth incurring the wrath of the Almighty and precipitating the Fall of Man, one might think, yet the blame remains with the apple, the genus name of which is Malus, Latin for evil.

The crab has been around for a long time, the earliest fossils dating from the Eocene period some 45 million years ago. The wild one native to northern Europe is thought to have come from the area now known as Kazakhstan. It was familiar in Anglo-Saxon Britain, for the family name Crabtree, said to trace back to 7th-century Yorkshire, derives from the Old English crabbe-treow and described someone living near a tree or trees.

The truly wild crab, Malus sylvestris or forest apple, accounts for some 40% of crab population across Europe, the rest consisting of feral hybrids, both natural and contrived, with a wide variation in their degrees of wildness. The original strain is most likely to survive on the edges of old woodland and in longestablished hedgerows, but its orchard progeny proliferates across the globe, with some 7,500 known cultivars. Can any other fruiting genus have contributed more generously to human agronomic endeavour? Perhaps the crab deserved a key role in Eden after all.