U Turn

Is it obvious that apples feature somewhat large in our lives at the moment? The year is prodigious, the crop exceptional, the task overwhelming. We will only succeed in harvesting a modest proportion. The rest will feed insects and birds, small mammals, fungi and bacteria and be recycled into the ground

We picked a large quantity in a short time this afternoon - easy pickings, as they say, and ready to be selective of only the best, the brightest, the biggest, the unblemished. This one should, by all logic, be excluded, heavily scarred as it is with what looks like a mini mole-track under its surface. But if I step back from the role of grower and look instead with an aesthetic eye, I find it intriguing, strangely compelling, like a painting with a deliberate disfigurement, merely to emphasise its beauty

It's actually the track of an apple sawfly larva, that has tunneled beneath the skin to get a decent meal, heedless of its role in our bigger picture. There are many different species of sawfly, some of them highly specific to a single host plant. A couple of years ago our garden had a plague of biblical proportions of Solomon's seal sawfly, of all things. The underside of every leaf on every plant was a writhing mass of hungry larvae, methodically chewing their way from edge to centre, growing larger as they progressed. Within a few days, the plants were mere skeletons. The long term effects seem to be negligible; the plants have reappeared each spring and the drama has not recurred

No need to hide under the desk