Every Apple Is a Clone
I want to begin with a small experiment that will cost you nothing and disappoint you enormously. Take the core of the apple you are about to eat — a good one, a crisp sweet one, a Cox or a Gala or whatever you have — and plant one of its pips. Water it. Wait, with the patience of a saint, for the five to ten years it will take to grow into a tree that fruits. And then taste the apple it gives you. It will be horrible. Not always, but very nearly always. It will be sour, or bitter, or woolly, or thin, or simply strange — some small hard green thing bearing no relation whatsoever to the lovely apple whose seed you so hopefully planted. Orchardists have a word for the apples that come up from seed, and the word is spitters , because that is what you do with the first bite. The parent was delicious. The child is a stranger, and usually a disappointing one. This is the single most extraordinary fact about the apple, and almost nobody who eats one ever learns it: the apple does not breed t...
