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One of the great pleasures of traveling is new things to draw and paint…except, of course, for when artists travel back home, in which case they get familiar subjects with which they have wrestled for a long time. Such is the case with the subject of today’s featured drawing (which I actually drew last Wednesday). Here is the soybean field on my parents’ farm which lies just to the north of their house and farmyard. Perhaps a soybean field does not sound particularly exciting to you (as opposed to crops of known beauty such as winter wheat or sunflowers), however I have always found its mid-tone blue green to be alluring and weirdly mysterious. When you look at the entirety of the fields, all decked in this same viridian, the effect is something like a green three dimensional lake. And even if the wind does not ripple the soybeans quite as majestically as it plays upon the wheat, there is a similar wave effect (albeit one which is completely beyond my ability to capture with watercolors). I have painted or drawn the soybean field many times, and I feel like August was right time to do so (with everything looking fulsome and verdant). I also got to include the apples on the tree (which was literally breaking beneath their weight), a single wandering pilgrim goose, the purple cone flowers in the field by the pond, and a few pink wisps in the clouds from sunset, which was on its way. Of course the picture sadly fails to capture the true beauty of the scene (although maybe I got a little closer to capturing the allure of the soy), but it was certainly a delight to sit and look closely at this scene which I have been watching for 40 years.
Apples (Malus pumila) originated in Central Asia somewhere around Turkey/Georgia/Armenia–where the wild apple (Malus sieversii) still grows. These delightful members of the rose family have been continuously cultivated, hybridized, grafted, and cloned since prehistory. Apples are shockingly promiscuous and their seeds are different (sometimes extremely different) from the parent, so varieties (“cultivars”) are cloned and grafted. There are more than 7500 cultivars of apples grown and each is really a clone—or a still living clonal scion–of the original tree they come from. The history and meaning and delight of the apple is beyond my ability to even begin to discuss, however I want to talk about the best variety of apple which is widely available in the United States, the Golden Delicious, because it comes from the same place as me. The first Golden Delicious tree comes from Clay County, an obscure county in West Virginia where my whole family hales from (well, at least for the last 250 years or so, I guess we are from Africa by way of Europe originally).
Golden Delicious apples are a bright yellow (or yellow green) apple which are extremely sweet and fragrant. The original tree was found on the Mullins’ family farm in Clay County and the fruit was locally known as “Mullin’s Yellow Seedling” and “Annit apple” until 1914/15 when it was renamed the Golden Delicious by Stark Brothers Nursery to whom Anderson Mullins sold the cultivation rights and the tree (for the then princely sum of $5000).
Golden delicious apples are wonderful for cooking, salads, and sauces, but their sweet taste makes them perfect for eating too (although their bright crisp flesh and nearly transparent skin makes them susceptible to bruising). Wikipedia tells us that “In 2010, an Italian-led consortium announced they had decoded the complete genome of the Golden delicious apple. It had the highest number of genes (57,000) of any plant genome studied to date.” To my eye, Golden Delicious apples also look like the golden apples of Aphrodite which sometimes play a saucy role in Greek mythology or even the forbidden apples of the Hesperides which conferred immortality (if you could get past Hera’s dragon). Anyway I picked a bunch of them upstate this past weekend and I can’t stop thinking about them…or eating them. After Halloween week is done, I will share my favorite apple pie recipe. However next week is not about apples…it is about snakes!
The Garden of the Hesperides (Sir Frederic Leighton, 1892)
In the Greek view of the world, there was a tranquil garden of perpetual rosy twilight which was found at the sunset edge of all lands–so far west that the west came to an end. The garden was inhabited by three nymphs of peerless beauty whose special task was to tend an apple tree in the middle of the garden. The golden fruit of the tree would confer immortality upon anyone who ate one. But of course there was a catch.
This was the penultimate labor of Hercules: to bring back three of the apples of the Hesperides. The tree was in the private garden of Hera herself and the apple tree was a wedding gift from Mother Earth to the queen of the gods. Plucking the apples from the tree would bring instant death to any mortal, but the biggest problem of all was the garden’s true guardian, the dragon Ladon who was coiled around the apple tree. As you might imagine, Ladon was one of Echidna’s offspring. He is sometimes shown as a great python, other times as a more traditional dragon, and occasionally as a hundred-headed uber-dragon.
The Garden of Hesperides (Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1870-1873)
Although dragons abound in Greek mythology, the snake-dragon curled around a sacred tree, seems to have arrived in Greek mythology from another canon altogether. Scholars believe Ladon’s original form was the Semitic serpent god Lotan, or the Hurrian/Hittite serpent Illuyanka. In fact, serpents/dragons wound around fruit trees are well-known in the three great monotheistic faiths of the present. In Greek mythology, Ladon only plays an active role in the story of Hercules 11th labor (and even then, the dragon’s role is curiously ambiguous).
Hercules and the Hesperides (Rubert Bunny, 1864 - 1947)
Hercules traveled through the Greek world having adventures, killing giants, and seeking the garden’s location. It was during his search for the Garden of the Hesperides that he slew the Caucasian Eagle and freed Prometheus (who, in gratitude, told him what to expect at the garden of the Hesperides). In order to obtain the apples, Hercules solicited the aid of the titan Atlas, who holds up the firmament. Hercules assumed the burden of the heavens while immortal Atlas collected the apples. When Atlas betrayed Hercules and left the strongman holding the heavens, Hercules pretended to accept his fate–but he asked to adjust his lionskin first. Once Atlas was holding the heavens again, Hercules picked up the apples and took them back to Eurystheus (who was rightly afraid of them, and gave them to Athena). The fate of the dragon is a bit unclear. In some versions Hercules kills him for good measure. For example, in the story of Jason and the golden fleece, Ladon’s corpse is spotted by the Argonauts—the creature’s body is still heaving and trembling years after death while the heartbroken nymphs sob. In other stories the dragon survives and, together with the nymphs, continues to look after the tree of life.
Because I can not resist, here are links to a very short and delightful comic strip consisting of a first, second, and third panel. The drawings contain mild nudity (which differs from that found in Lord Leighton’s painting above only in that the strip is contemporary). The creator, M.L. Peters, tried to add a feeling of fin de siècle illustration so as to give the comic punchline a deeper resonance, and I feel he succeeded admirably. Additionally I love anchovies.
ferrebeekeeper 
