Apples a Symbol of Fertility

Description

I was keen to paint the apple to represent its shape and the shades of the rosy red skin. When I think of apples, I remember apple pie and custard, or an activity in pony club called the apple race, where we would ride our horses up to a drum of apples bobbing in water, get off our horse and then try to bite an apple without using our hands.  The first person to do this won the apple race.

According to Whiteman and Mayhew (2012, p. 18), ever since Adam bit into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, apples have been the stuff of myth and legend. The Romans were the first people to cultivate apples.  There were at least a dozen varieties of apples growing in the first century throughout the Roman Empire.  The Ancient Greeks and Romans believed apples to be aphrodisiacs.  Celts believed crab apples were a symbol of fertility. During Halloween, apples have been used in customs known as apple-bobbing, and during Christmas they were used for wassailing, an ancient English winter tradition aimed at wishing health and a good harvest for the coming year.  In China, apples symbolise peace and the gifting of apples during the Christmas season to friends and associates is a popular way to wish them peace and safety. In Australia, Granny Smith apples originated as an accidental ‘chance seedling” in 1868 in Eastwood, New South Wales. They were discovered by Maria Ann “Granny” Smith, an English migrant who accidentally propagated the tree after discarding the remains of Tasmanian-grown French crab apples near a creek (Wikipedia.org.au).