Gardens: why we need to protect Kazakhstan’s wild apples — theguardian.com

Apples tumble all over the earth, and I slide with them into a huge old tree, a gentle shower of new fruit fall. I lie back into this soft, dark earth and smell the heady scent of ripening fruit. This Eden is on the side of a mountain in Kazakhstan, where apples originally came from. I’ve dragged the chef Ben Reade along with me. Ben is an intrepid flavour explorer, and he likes an adventure. He will do ludicrous things to taste something new, or in this case something very old. He also has two things I need for this trip: a very good palate, which is important for describing apple flavours, and he’s very tall – at almost 6ft 6in he can reach more apples than me. So here we are, two redheads – one tall, one small – off to find the original apple.

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