Excerpt from the Popular Garden Series magabookOrchardingwith permission from its publisher , BowTie magazines , a division of BowTie Inc. PurchaseOrchardinghere .
Most historian believe theappleoriginated in the Dzungarian Alps , a stack range separate Kazakhstan , Kyrgyzstan , and China , where wildapple treesstill bring forth teensy apple the size and shape of the seedy and sour ancestors of the world ’s favourite Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree fruit . Others insist the furious apple uprise in the Caucasus Mountains between the dark and Caspian Seas . Whichever is straight , as other humans migrated to other lands , they carried apples with them until apples became established throughout all of Asia , the Mediterranean region and the Middle East .
A tab found in Mesopotamia date from 1500 B.C. records the sales agreement of an orchard apple tree woodlet by an Assyrian named Tupkitilla . The price : the princely sum of three lever breedersheep .
In the thirteenth hundred B.C. , Egyptian pharaoh Ramses the Great ordered domesticated Malus pumila grown in the Nile Delta .
The ancient Greeks were fond of apples as evidenced by Homer ’s writings . In 323 B.C. , the Greek phytologist , Theophrastos , sing the praise of six dissimilar varieties of apples and described the art of budding and grafting apple . Rome follow Greece ’s lead and soon embraced apples . The lyric poet Horace ( 65 - 8 B.C. ) waxed enthusiastic of apples while Cicero ( 106 - 43 B.C. ) further the cultivation of new apple cultivars . Pliny the Elder ( 23 - 79 A.D. ) described 37 variety of cultivate apples grown throughout the Roman Empire .
As Caesar ’s horde conquered Continental Europe and the British Isles , they carry appleseedsand found orchards to supplement native crabapples they found get wild along the way . By the first hundred A.D. , orchard - grown apples were established as far north as the Rhine Valley of Germany . subsequently orchard - grown Malus pumila were develop in monastery and convent grove throughout Great Britain and Europe .
Many early writers rhapsodize about apples . Bartholomeus Angelicus drop a line in his botanical encyclopedia , On the Properties of Things ( indite around 1240 and one of the first such volumes of its kind ) , that “ Malus the Appyll tree is a tree yt bareth orchard apple tree and is a grete tree in itself … with goode fruyte and noble … ( The yield ) is gracious in syght and in taste and virtuous in medecyne . ” Indeed , Dr. John Caius , 16th century physician to three British monarchs , give notice his patients to “ smele to an old swete Malus pumila to recover strengthe . ”
by nature , apples crossed the Atlantic when the unexampled American Colonies were founded in the early years of the 17th hundred .
