The origin of apple

Apples are native to Central and Southeast Europe, Central Asia and even Xinjiang [8]. In Europe, as early as 300 BC, M.P. Cato had recorded the varieties of apples. Later, the Romans began to cultivate, graft and reproduce. /kloc-in the 0/8th century, J.B. Montessori and T.A. used natural hybridization to select seedlings and gradually popularized cultivation. When the New World of America was discovered, European immigrants introduced apples to America, and many new varieties were cultivated in America. During the Meiji Restoration, Japan introduced apples from Europe and America to Asia. Since then, Australia and Africa have also introduced apples. In the past hundred years, apples have been planted all over five continents. The earliest Europeans ate apples and improved their choices. Some varieties were seen more than 2000 years ago. Before colonizing the United States, there were hundreds of known varieties in Europe. Later, with the wave of immigration sweeping across North America, the seedlings of apple varieties also spread everywhere, becoming itinerant messengers of local legends, which played an important role in the spread of apples. The most prominent one was john chapman (nicknamed "〔Johnny Appleseed"), who planted apples widely in Ohio and Indiana. Indians and hunters may also spread apples. Apple has been cultivated in China for more than 2000 years. According to legend, the "purple nai" eaten by Yu Xia is a red apple, which means that there were apples in China a long time ago. Guo of the Jin Dynasty wrote: "There are many cases in the west, and every family takes cut dew as preserved fruit, and hundreds of them are accumulated, which is called regular food." At that time, it was known that "on the second day of the first month, if the axe is mottled, it will spare the child." That is, it is similar to modern girdling technology and promotes more achievements. It can be seen that the technical level of apple planting in China in Jin Dynasty has reached a quite high level. Li, a poet in the Song Dynasty, wrote a poem in "100 Poems on the South China Sea", which has been recited: "There is autumn wind in the house, and the green leaves are not exhausted. I mistakenly think it is a flower, but I don't know that the pods are scarlet." By the Ming Dynasty, there were not only "Su-naphthalene, Zhu-ban and Qing-ban" cooked in summer, but also "Liangzhou had winter-ban, which was cooked in winter and blue in color" (Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica). China Gugeng Ba and Lin Ling, though "smooth and playful, heard several steps", "taste, the immature people eat like cotton wool, and the overripe people rot with sand" (see Qunfangpu). After European apples were naturalized in China in the middle of19th century, they gradually replaced cotton apples in China. European apples first settled in Yantai, Shandong, and were introduced to Qingdao, Shandong and southern Liaoning from the end of 19 to the beginning of this century, and began to be cultivated economically. At present, in all apple producing areas in China, except for the original apple tree species, most of the economically cultivated apple varieties are introduced from Europe, the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union and other countries, which are called western apples.