A captivating cultural and scientific history of orchards for readers of Michael Pollan's The
Botany of Desire and Mark Kurlansky's Salt. Throughout history orchards have nourished both
body and soul: they are sites for worship and rest inspiration for artists and writers and
places for people to gather. In Taming Fruit award-winning writer Bernd Brunner interweaves
evocative illustrations with masterful prose to show that the story of orchards is a story of
how we have shaped nature to our desires for millennia. As Brunner tells it the first orchards
may have been oases dotted with date trees where desert nomads stopped to rest. In the Amazon
Indigenous people maintained mosaic gardens centuries before colonization. Modern fruit
cultivation developed over thousands of years in the East and the West. As populations expanded
fruit trees sprang from the lush gardens of the wealthy and monasteries to fields and roadsides
changing landscapes as they fed the hungry. But orchards don't just produce fruit they also
inspire great artists. Taming Fruit shares paintings photographs and illustrations alongside
Brunner's enchanting descriptions and research offering a multifaceted--and
long-awaited-portrait of the orchard.
