To quote Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th century Swedish philosopher and mystic, “We can see from this (from Nature), as though in a mirror, how perfection stems from variety in heaven as well, since things that happen in the natural world offer us a reflection of things in the spiritual world.” When we look upon variety in Nature, that variety corresponds to a spiritual reality. I find myself standing in a wheat field; before me the crop stretches out across the undulating topography. As I walk the path, my eyes catch upon the uniform lines, the crops, perfectly ordered. After a short time, I reach the edge of a wood, and stepping across the threshold, moving from the field to the wood, my spirit is lifted, for I have gone from the singular to the varied. From the land ordered by man, to the land ordered by God.

Here, where the variety is at its greatest, there is a more perfect whole. To engage with it, to be caught up with it, to commune with this sacred symbiotic, is to have one’s spirit revivified. Swedenborg’s insights concerning spirituality and the natural order, have had a profound effect upon the landscape of ideas. This notion that we can view the natural world as a sacred experience, a place to encounter the divine, influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, W. B. Yeats, and Carl Jung, to name a few - some of the individuals that occupy me. And so, we can consider Swedenborg’s approach in relation to apples, and more broadly to apple trees, in their great variety. Take the apple seed: in an apple seed you have the infinite potential for propagation, one seed begets a tree, which begets more apples, more seeds, more trees… an infinite wealth of variety. Swedenborg would take this insight, and see it as reflecting something of God’s character, reflecting God’s infinite and creative potential, infinite potentials branching off, and yet all one. Or, you could view God as a seed, in the sense that he is planted within you, as a conduit of love, hope, or compassion, and as those ideas root down within you, and become more than ideas, become part of you, you in turn propagate, and plant such seeds of compassion in others, which again take root, and on and on it goes, ad infinitum, a divine process within the great whole.

Take a green apple, a Granny Smith from the table, cut it in half, and recover one of the seeds. Go outside and plant it in the soil, and the seed will germinate, its roots will spread down into the ground, and a green shoot will break up out of the soil. Slowly it will reach up into the air, and after a period of time, six to ten years, the apple tree will begin to bear fruit. What you may not know, however, is that the tree will not bear Granny Smith apples. The seeds of an apple differ significantly genetically from the parent plant. So, the apples that the tree would bear would have a random assortment of characteristics. It would probably be more of a russet, with a rougher exterior than you’re used to, probably a less appealing colouration, and probably more sour than you’re used to also. In order to have our new tree bear Granny Smith apples, you would need to take a branch from a Granny Smith apple tree, cut it off, and graft it on to our new tree, thus cloning the original. And to complicate things slightly more, the proximity of the trees to one another is also important, because bees pollinate from one tree to the other. All the apples we can buy at the supermarket today are the result of English Victorian and pre-Victorian horticulturists experimenting with apples’ taste, colour, and textures, and have all been preserved since then by grafting and re-grafting. So, the Granny Smith apple, for example, was discovered by an English woman living in Australia, Maria Ann Smith, aka Granny Smith. She found the seedling growing in her compost bin (this is in 1868). She took it out of the compost, cared for it, and it grew into a tree that produced the characteristically green skinned, hard, crisp apple we know, and having been cut, grafted, and re-grafted, it became popular in Australia and New Zealand, and is now grown all over the world.