Nobody is going to mourn for an apple tree

It is somewhat ironic that the very same day we published a comment (article here) bemoaning the ever increasing encroachment of the car parks in Barga ( although with today’s news of the very strong possibility of 130 redundancies at the foundry in Fornaci – making tourism probably more important for the future of the city than ever before and therefore car parks in some form or another more and more necessary) yet another low blow to the ecosystem went almost unnoticed.

Construction work around the car park below Barga Vecchia stretching almost from the hospital through to Parco Kennedy has been ongoing for the last 12 months in an attempt to stop the land slipping into the valley.

This morning one of the trees on land next to the car park was chopped down.

If you stand on the spot and look today you can still still see thousands of trees stretching into the distance …. so one tree more or less would probably make very little difference.

Except that the chopping down of this tree today was almost painfully emblematic not just for the loss of a single tree but because it went practically unnoticed.

The tree in question was an apple tree, an old apple tree, a type of apple tree that once upon a time flourished in this area and was noted and cherished for the small sweet fragrant apples which grew on them.

Unfortunately with the rise of the supermarkets and later still, the hypermarkets with their strict quality controls and marketing of uniformly and visually pleasing fruit and vegetables, the smaller less well-known varieties, even if they actually tastier were gradually left out in the cold, so to speak, and people no longer viewed them as anything of any importance.

An apple had to be a sharp green colour or large shiny Disney red.

Those that did not fit what was viewed as “the perfect apple” became unsellable, unwanted and in time, almost invisible.

In fact this particular tree had not been harvested for some years and it’s unfashionably small and sometimes misshapen fruit was allowed to fall to the ground and over time rot back into the earth.

To my knowledge only one person diligently collected some of the windfall each year and carried it home to her family to enjoy the taste of a fruit that their grandparents would have enjoyed and an apple and which has more or less been erased from the local culture.

Each year they would marvel at the fact that this succulent, oh so tasty treat was just there for the asking – nobody else ever bothered to pick up the fruit and now that experience has disappeared along with so many others.

Nobody is going to mourn for an apple tree are they ?