Brunner, Bernd. Taming Fruit: How Orchards Have Transformed the Land, Offered Sanctuary, and Inspired Creativity. Translated By Lori Lantz. Vancouver and Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2021.
Throughout history, orchards have served many sacred purposes: they are sites of worship and rest, inspiration for artists and writers, and vibrant community hubs. Moreover, they are places of sustenance. In Taming Fruit, award-winning writer Bernd Brunner interweaves beautiful illustrations and prose to show that the story of orchards is a human story. It is also a story of how humans have shaped and bent nature according to our desires for millennia.
As Brunner tells, the first orchards may have been oases dotted with date trees, where desert nomads stopped to rest. In the Amazon, Indigenous tribes 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. (Source: Greystone Books)
Excerpt from Taming Fruit: How Orchards Have Transformed the Land, Offered Sanctuary, and Inspired Creativity, by Bernd Brunner (tr. Lori Lantz), available November 2021 from Greystone Books. Excerpted by permission of the publisher.
© 2021 Greystone Books