The Botany of Desire Page #4
- TV-14
- Year:
- 2009
- 120 min
- 1,981 Views
The repository of all
the genetic diversity
Of the apple in america
was in the cider orchard.
Today it's in these collections
That are maintained by
some visionary individuals
Who understand the importance of
preserving this biodiversity.
There's a vicious circle
That we get into, which is,
we have monocultures
In the field,
and monocultures on the plate.
Monocultures of taste.
Fruit now has to
compete with soda.
So it has got to be super-sweet,
very sweet --
We have apples that, as one
critic said of the delicious,
It has "sweetness
without dimension."
The problem is, it's boring,
Sweetness --
if that's all you get.
In lebanon,
new hampshire,
that problem
By reaching back
into the apple's past.
Stephen wood is the owner of
poverty lane orchards.
He used to grow mostly
standard varieties,
Like macs and cortlands --
But found he couldn't match
the prices
Of the big commercial growers.
We realized
in the late '80s
That what we'd always done
Wasn't going to work
any longer,
And that we either had to change
quite dramatically
What we were doing, or stop
growing apples altogether.
But for wood,
Giving up on his orchard
seemed inconceivable.
You know, some people adore
antique clocks,
How are we doing on water core?
We started some grafting trials
Of what I guess you could call
"antique" varieties --
Varieties that are not
commonly grown anymore,
But once were.
This is wickson.
This apple originated
in the pacific northwest
In the late 19th century.
It's got a beautiful acidity.
This is pomme grise.
It has very low acid,
high sugar,
And a sort of...
A sort of nutty flavor.
This apple is
calville blanc d'hiver.
It's got a little bit of
sweetness behind the acid.
You look at 17th-century
french still-lifes,
This is the apple you see
Beside the dead pheasant
and the bottle of wine.
There's a huge number of
apple varieties --
It's almost infinite.
But it's tough to
make a living
Selling only
antique eating apples.
So wood turned his attention to
Another lost chapter
Most of his orchard
is now producing apples...
For hard cider.
It is a gamble to plant
Acres and acres
of inedible apples...
Many of the best cider apples
are disgusting --
Bitter, astringent apples.
The decision to plant
Not just a few trees,
But thousands and thousands
of those trees,
Could be quite a good joke
if the cider doesn't make it,
going to wind up
In a kid's lunch box --
There's no secondary market
for this stuff.
Wonderful breakfast drink.
We are trying,
with a few other colleagues,
Basically to create a category
in the u.S. Wine trade
Of "fine ciders."
I think we're doing
quite well in that,
But the jury is still out.
There are a lot of fruits
That have gotten ahead in life
By being sweet
and gratifying the sweet tooth
Of mammals like us,
But there's something
about the apple,
You know -- it's so iconic
In western civilization,
And so enduring
in its relationship,
And its ability, really, to
gratify our changing desires --
For alcohol, and for
a wonderfully sweet food --
That my guess is, it will
succeed for many years to come.
The mystery is,
Why things that
bees regard as beautiful,
We also regard
as beautiful --
I mean, what are the odds that
we would have the same taste
As this little bug?
When I say the bee has a concept
of beauty,
I mean, I'm being metaphorical.
But the bee and ourselves
have a lot in common.
We really like symmetry,
We like certain patterns
Of color, and certain scents --
we agree about scent, as well.
The bee loves this flower
And this flower has evolved
to attract it.
Well, this plant has also
evolved to attract us.
To the extent that
a flower can gratify
Our ideas of a beautiful color,
A beautiful shape,
a beautiful smell,
It will dominate the landscape,
Dominate the flower industry,
Get many more copies
of itself made,
And take over the world.
And few flowers
Have traveled the road from
obscurity to fame
More spectacularly than
the tulip.
59 years ago,
I saw first tulip
in my life.
And that was in the garden
of my father.
And now my whole life
is with tulips.
Nobody knows tulips
better than the dutch --
And few dutchmen know them
better than joop zonneveld,
But he has a curious way of
describing their effect on him.
You look after every
tulip, step by step,
It becomes worse, worse,
and worse.
For me, it was something,
it's in me, it never stops.
Zonneveld's been
a tulip buyer, a salesman,
And now he's conservator
Of one of the most famous
Hortus bulborum
in the netherlands,
A showplace for
the remarkable diversity
Of this sometimes
underappreciated flower.
In this garden,
We have 2,300 varieties.
You have dark purple colors,
You have lily flowering tulips,
There's a tulip
that has the shape like this,
Like a lily flower.
You have yellow, red,
Pink, orange, bicolored,
Single earlies,
single late, double late --
So there are so many things
in the tulips
That once you start,
even myself, I discover
Every day new things.
Today, zonneveld is
giving a tour
To photographer ruth dundas
Two americans who have
Come to hortus to gather
material for a new book.
This is a lovely
viridiflora.
Tulips are about the last
subject they thought
Would ever capture
their interest.
I have to say, honestly,
That when I first started
to photograph,
photograph was tulips.
It's pretty boring,
It's a lollipop
on top of a stick,
You know, you get
different colors, but that's it.
It's only once
you come to gardens
Such as the hortus bulborum here
That you start to understand
That this is
a very varied flower,
And it's adapted and mutated
Into many different forms.
It's a lot of fun
to photograph,
That there's
a constant challenge
To look into this flower
And be able to see new color,
new light.
You can take a bouquet of tulips
And photograph it
every hour of the day.
And it's something quite
different each time.
Perfect, gorgeous.
It just seems so amazing
that you have
This extraordinary variety
that's been cultivated
Over centuries,
and somehow you grew up
Flowers began
flaunting their beauty
Long before there were people.
It was more than
When the class of plants
The angiosperms --
first appeared on the earth.
The great revolution in
natural history
Is the rise of the angiosperms.
This is the class of plants
that makes conspicuous flowers,
Forms fruit and seed.
This was a new way of doing
business in nature.
The flower of
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