Every apple you have eaten comes from Kazakhstan
The main wild ancestor of the domestic apple still grows in forests in the mountains around Almaty, a city whose name is often linked to the Kazakh word for apple.
In the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains, around Almaty and the Ili valley, there are forests of wild apple trees. Their fruit varies enormously from tree to tree: some small and sour, some large and sweet, in yellow, green and red.
These trees are Malus sieversii, and genetic studies, including the 2010 sequencing of the apple genome, identified them as the primary ancestor of the domestic apple. Your Golden Delicious, Granny Smith or Fuji ultimately descends from trees like these.
How apples left home
Apples don’t grow true from seed: every seed produces a different tree. Over thousands of years, people and animals moving along the routes that became the Silk Road carried the best fruit west and east. Along the way they hybridised with other wild apples, and growers learned to graft, copying good trees exactly. The result is the thousands of varieties we know.
The name of the city
The old Soviet name of Almaty was Alma-Ata, often translated as “father of apples”, and alma means apple in Kazakh. The modern name is commonly explained as “full of apples”. The exact etymology is debated, but the connection to apples is how most locals tell it, and the city celebrates it.
A forest worth saving
The Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov visited the region in 1929 and recognised it as a centre of origin for apples. Since then many of the wild forests have been lost to farming, building and grazing, and the IUCN lists the species as vulnerable. Plant breeders value them as a gene bank: wild trees may hold resistance to diseases that threaten commercial orchards.
Bring it up
“The wild ancestor of every apple you’ve ever eaten still grows in the mountains near Almaty in Kazakhstan.”
Follow the thread
- Same patternTulips are Central Asian, not Dutch Two of the world’s most familiar plants trace their wild roots to the same mountains.
- RelatedBefore 1492, Italy had no tomatoes and Thailand had no chillies Another case of a familiar food whose homeland is far from where people assume.
- RelatedXi’an was once one of the largest cities on Earth Silk Road traders and their animals helped carry apples out of Central Asia.
