HE 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 a jay 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, Latin for evil.
