Taming Fruit: How Orchards Have Transformed the Land, Offered Sanctuary, and Inspired Creativity

For readers of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire and Mark Kurlansky’s Salt.

The story of orchards is a human story. It is also a story of how humans have bent and shaped nature to our tastes and desires for millennia.

In Taming Fruit, award-winning writer Bernd Brunner interweaves science, literature, art, history, and geography to tell the complete and fascinating story of orchards and humans.

The first orchards may have been oases dotted with date trees, where desert nomads stopped to rest.

In the Amazon, Indigenous tribes maintained beautiful mosaic gardens centuries before colonisation.

Modern fruit cultivation developed over thousands of years in the West and the East. 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.

When settlers colonised North America, they brought apple orchards and orange groves. Today, rewilding efforts break down fences, encouraging nature to play an active role.

But orchards are not only for growing fruit; they are also places of worship and creativity, inspiring poems, music, and art.

This sweeping account of orchards explores an overlooked focal point of our relationship to nature. It also offers gorgeous illustrations of orchards past and present, each one more beautiful than the last.

‘Beautiful…Brunner is an astute guide to the fascinating relationships between orchards and human culture.’ - David George Haskell, author of Pulitzer finalist, The Forest Unseen