1
In the 1700s Prince Carl of Denmark eats Gravenstein apples while visiting the dappled shade of 
an orchard in Italy. Its rigid trunk offered the cuttings of an idea that would take to graft at his 
summer home:	 a white castle on the blue lip of the Baltic Sea.  Seeds planted, then tended until 
great orchards bloomed across the flat low lands where the sea seeps in slowly, where salt, like 
history lingers on the air. Tart-sweetness bulging from a red-barred orb.

2
By the time the orchards grew into vast bounding fields, the Germanic spoken legends of the 
North Sea were receding like the tide as were the resources. Entire islands of stories were 
swallowed whole in a storm.

3
For a century, gardeners cut and grafted the bone-barred heart of the fruit to perfection: until it 
tasted bittersweet enough, until it kept long enough to travel large distances.  Then, the seeds and 
cutting were slipped into the trunks of steamship passengers. Tiny seedlings kept moist across 
long passages.  Until the Gravenstein seedling was carefully unwrapped from its moist, burlap 
coverings to be planted in Sebastopol on freshly clear-cut hills that rolled to the sea.

4
In the 1850s, those who didn’t find gold farmed. Orchards covered the bare hills as fast as they 
were cleared of scrub oak and pine and Miwok.  And the years seeped in. The horticulturalists 
grafting to win a longer market, a higher yield. But, what the apple bore was memory: a long 
traveled, bitter-sweet taste that can’t be bred out or baked out or forgotten.  

Red lines that bind the fruit to the hands that pick to the stories that still whisper on the low roll 
of a long travelled sea where salt, like history, lingers on the air.