Feral Apple Ink
“These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Wild Apples
If you plant a granny smith apple seed you might get any kind of strange tree growing out of it. The phenomenon is called extreme heterozygosity and it means that the children of apples are totally different than their parents. So what we call wild apples are really feral apples. Last week I noticed a stain in the snow and following the stain I found a scattering of leaves under a old wild apple tree and gathering the leaves up I took them home with a scoop of snow and simmered the mixture in a steel pot while reading up on crabapples and rare breed apples and wild apples and sure enough the leaves released a delicious scent and a first just a slight golden colour and then a rich tannic pigment which on paper showed a deep almost-orange colour I had never quite seen before.
I have an apple orchard behind my house and make a lovely ink from the prunings which get conveniently left under the tree each year. I found there is not a lot of colour difference between the twigs, bark and leaves. I also made some apple twig pens which are fun to write with
💛 That orange color! So rich and lovely!
🙏 for telling about Thoreau writing about Apples 🍎 I am going to get the book!