A IS FOR APPLE (Malus domestica),1 a member of the rose family (Rosaceae), famously thought to be the fruit the serpent gave to Eve and Adam to eat. It had been the one thing they were forbidden to do, eat that fruit, and after they did, they fell in love with the world around them, and understandably so, for they were in a garden. The fruit they ate could not have been the apple we know today, as that fruit is native to Central Asia. Most likely what Eve and Adam ate was a pomegranate. There is a legend that says there are as many seeds in a pomegranate as there are laws in the Torah, the Bible of the Jewish people, known to many others as the Old Testament.
A IS FOR APPLE AND ADAM, TOO. In the very first mention of human creation, God created man and woman in his own image. (“And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”)
Adam and Eve as yet have no names. In the second creation story, God makes a garden, fills it with trees and animals, then makes a man and names him Adam. God allows the man Adam to name everything in the garden. Then perhaps God feels sorry for the loneliness of Adam so he causes him to fall asleep, and while he is asleep God removes one of Adam’s ribs and makes a woman called Eve out of it, to be his companion. In the middle of the Garden of Eden, the place where Adam and Eve live, there are two trees: the tree of Life and the tree of Knowledge. God tells them they can partake of all the fruits in the garden except for the fruits from the tree of Knowledge. Like children everywhere, they do the thing they are told they should not do and eat from the tree of Knowledge. God, like most parents, is very angry and imposes a punishment on them, expelling them from the garden and making them homeless. It is a catastrophe that much later He regrets. In any case, they were asked to leave Eden through an eastern gate and told they could never return. And just in case they thought their banishment was a joke, because parents are notorious for changing their minds, an Angel was placed at the gate through which they had made their exit and he was given a twirling sword burning with a special fire; there he stands on guard to prevent them from sneaking in. A sad coda: Eve’s female descendants, her daughters, are not particularly noted in her story. She seems to have never given birth to a woman of any note generation after generation.
A IS ALSO FOR AMARANTH (Amaranthus). The amaranth is an herbaceous plant native to the southern parts of the American continent that had been home to and inhabited by the Aztec and Inca peoples. It was cultivated by them and was a substantial part of their daily diet. It was also used as a drink in rituals dedicated to various deities; for instance, it was an important part of ceremonies dedicated to the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. When the Spaniards were not committing genocide against these peoples they met, who had made a comfortable life for themselves for generations and created extraordinary, glorious monuments to their civilizations, they were forcing them to abandon this source of physical and spiritual nourishment and replace it with barley, wheat, and other European grains. This, along with many other cruelties, led to the decline of the Aztecs and the Inca. The amaranth is now eaten all over the world, valued for its richness in protein and micronutrients. It is also grown as an ornamental plant in gardens, where it is prized for its vibrant colors and impressive height. Some gardeners, when reflecting on its history and its appearance in their garden as an ornamental, have a very fleeting debate within themselves over the ethics of growing food as an ornamental.
B IS FOR BREADFRUIT (Artocarpus altilis), which belongs in the same family as the Morus or mulberry (family name Moraceae), from whose fruits wine and jam can be made, and whose leaves are the sole food of the silkworm. The breadfruit is native to the Polynesian Islands, where it was found by Captain James Cook on his first voyage to that part of the world in 1769. Captain Cook was accompanied by the distinguished bot-anist Joseph Banks, who, more than any other single person, would influence the way many plants we’re familiar with, some of them grouped into a category called the economic annual, were redistributed to var-ious parts of the Earth that shared a similar climate to the ones from which they originated. This was all to the benefit of that bastion of evil known as the British Empire. The breadfruit was sent to the West Indies by Banks, first to the islands of St. Vincent and Jamaica. It was regarded as a cheap source of food for the enslaved people on the Islands. The slaves apparently were taking time from their labors to grow food to feed their hungry selves. The breadfruit was the cargo carried on the HMS Bounty, captained by Captain William Bligh, when his crew mutinied.
C IS FOR COTTON (Gossypium), a member of the mallow family (see Hibiscus), which also includes okra, hollyhock, and cacao or cocoa, from which is made chocolate. Cotton appears in regions nearest the equator. It has been used to weave into clothing for thousands of years. Adam and Eve could quite possibly have used it after they grew tired of using the leaf of the fig to hide their nakedness from each other. Cotton is one of the crops that played an important part in the industrialization and wealth of Europe. The community of people now disparagingly known as Luddites and portrayed as ignorant people opposed to the progress of the industrial revolution were really weavers of textiles who could not keep up with the vast amount of cotton produced by the enslaved people of African descent in the newly conquered islands in the Caribbean and the southern parts of North America. The mechanization of weaving textiles made the hand loom inefficient and unprofitable, and the hand loomers resorted to sabotaging the mechanized looms because they were losing a way to make sense of the world. Cotton, along with the sugarcane, was among the first commodities to make the world we now live in a global community.
D IS FOR DAFFODIL, the common name for the Narcissus. It is native to the moist meadows and woods of temperate climates. Its appearance in the spring is eagerly awaited, its shy yellow color and slightly bowed blossom almost indicating gratitude for surviving the long dark days of the winter. The joy and abandonment of the burden that is everyday life a daffodil brings to an English person is commemorated in a poem by William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
This poem became canonical in the education of children who were subjects of the British Empire. For the most part, these children were native to places where a daffodil would be unable to grow and so would never be seen by them.
E IS FOR EARTH. The earth you hold in your hand as you make a place to plant a seed is part of the Earth, our home, the planet on which we live. The Earth, our home, is five billion years old, impossible to imagine and yet true. Scientists, people who have studied this, have speculated that the atmosphere in which we humans, individual gardeners, now live is the result of one hundred million years’ rain of toxic natural chemicals, so here we are. Before we came into existence, many other beings very different from us roamed our home. We only know of them through our determined search for their remains—a bone here, a skull there. The gardener walks the earth, which will eventually shrug us off, as it has done many times before with many things and beings that preceded us.
F IS FOR FRANKLINIA. Franklinia alatamaha is a deciduous member of the Theaceae family. The plant was named for Benjamin Franklin by his friend John Bartram, an American botanist and plant collector in Colonial times. Bartram was the botanist for King George III and the father of William Bartram, also a great botanist and writer. John and William Bartram found this plant growing on the banks of the Altamaha River in what is now called Georgia. The Bartrams traveled extensively in the southern part of what is now the United States. John corresponded with botanists from Europe, among them the notorious Carolus Linnaeus and Thomas Jefferson; William wrote a book called Travels of William Bartram, which is thought to have been a great influence on the English Romantic poets, in particular William Wordsworth. The Franklinia has never been seen again in its natural habitat since that sighting by Bar-tram father and son, and all the plants that exist today are descended from their collection of it.
G IS FOR GUAVA. The guava (Psidium guajava) is a fruit beloved by children who live in the area of the world known as the Caribbean and in nearby Venezuela. It bears beautiful white flowers that almost everybody completely ignores because the fruit to come is delicious to eat just picked from the tree when ripe. It can also be made into a beverage or a jam or paste that when cut into squares is a treat for a child going to or coming from school.
Copyright © 2024 by Jamaica Kincaid
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