The Golden Apples of the Hesperides | The Gardens Trust

Greek myths are eternally popular, so after a recent post on the story behind aquilegias today I’m turning my attention to another garden-related classical legend , that of the Garden of the Hesperides.

The garden belonged to the queen of the gods – Hera in Greek [Juno in the later Roman version], and lay somewhere at the western edge of the known Mediterranean world. In it grew a tree [or maybe an orchard of trees] which bore golden apples said to give immortality to those who ate them.

The golden glow from these apples was also thought to be the source of sunsets. The job of looking after the garden was given to the Hesperides who were the nymphs of the sunset, but because Hera didn’t entirely trust them she installed another guardian as well – Ladon, the multi-headed dragon who somehow never needed to sleep.

The Garden of the Hesperides is the setting for several well known myths, before, in the 17thc it was picked up and reinvented by artists and garden writers writing about “golden apples” of a different sort.

It’s worth pointing out that there is no single source and thus no single version of any Greek myths, and often the stories that have been passed down are strikingly different from one another. The oldest versions of the Hesperides story date back to the 7thc BC, but there are at least 15 different retellings of it in Greek texts over the next thousand years as well, and at least 6 more in Latin. These accounts can’t even agree on how many nymphs there were.Most have 3 [like the 3 Graces, 3 Fates and 3 Furies] but some versions have 4, 5 or 7.

The parentage of the poor nymphs is even more confusing – I’ve found 8 different possibilities although many say they are the daughters of Nyx, the goddess of the night, while others say their father was Atlas the giant who held up the sky.

Apart from their role as guardians of the golden apples the Hesperides are also goddesses of the evening and wedding nights, and in some versions they also act as keepers of other treasures of the gods which allows them to appear into several more stories.

So where were these gardens? The Greeks thought their world was completely encircled by a boundless river they called Okeanos (Oceanus), and that the Hesperides lived on its western shore, sometimes on an island just offshore named Erytheia (“the Red”). Later classical writers claimed this was in southern Spain or North-West Africa. Claims have been put in for sites as diverse as Benghazi in Libya, a place in Morocco where the Atlas mountains come down to the sea, and southern Portugal.

ThE gardens claim to fame is, of course, having those golden apples. Since they were supposed to enable immortality it meant there are lots of attempts to sneak inland steal them. One successful venture was by the hero Herakles (Hercules) who had to fetch three of them as one of his twelve labours for the king of Mycenae. In the most widespread version he tricks Atlas into getting them for him. Atlas was of course holding up the sky, so Heracles offers to take over for a while Atlas, who has easy access to the garden because he was the father of the Hesperides, goes off to pick the apples.

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Of course when Atlas returns he realises he doesn’t really want to go on standing with the sky on his shoulders for ever, so he offers to deliver the apples to the king on Herakles behalf. OK says the hero, but take the weight back for a second while I adjust my cloak to make it more comfortable. When Atlas agrees and has the sky on his shoulders once more Herakles simply walks away with the apples leaving Atlas to his thankless job.

Other versions have no mention of Atlas but have Heracles killing Ladon the dragon and collecting the apples himself instead.

In a second case of trickery the huntress Atalanta offered to marry anyone who could outrun her—but the downside was that those she outran ended up on the end of her spear. However, one suitor, Melanion, [in other versions he’s called Hippomanes] was given three golden apples by the goddess Aphrodite.

During the race as Atalanta was about to overtake him he dropped one. She, of course, stopped to pick it up. As soon as she caught up he dropped another which again she retrieved and drew level. Finally with the assistance of the goddess he threw the third far enough to away so that by the time she’s found it he had won the race and she had to marry him. Luckily they were very happy until they were turned into lions for making love in one of Zeus’s temples – but thats another story!

Probably the most famous story about the golden apples is the one that led to the start of the Trojan wars. Eris, goddess of strife, was left off the guest list for an important wedding. She was not best pleased and decided to have be revenged for being snubbed. Somehow she managed to steal an apple from the garden, then inscribed it with the words “To the fairest” and threw it into the crowd of wedding guests. It was immediately claimed by three of the other goddesses there: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite.

Unable to agree amongst themselves they asked Zeus to judge who was fairest, but he, wise man, declined to choose between his wife and two of his daughters so he passed the buck to Paris, a Trojan prince who was known to be an exemplary fair-minded man. Each of the three goddesses offered him various inducements to choose them, but in the end the judgement of Paris was to give the apple to Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world to be his wife. Unfortunately this was Helen, who was already married Menelaus, king of Sparta, so when she ran away with Paris it triggered the Trojan War.

So what’s all this got to do with 17thc garden writers?

Some authors of late antiquity attempted to rationalise the myth of the Hesperides and decided the golden apples might not be apples after all – since apples were generally red or green – perhaps they were actually another fruit. One of these authors was Athenaeus, who lived in the 3rd century AD. His Deipnosophistae professes to be an account of the conversations held at series of banquets. While this might sound a bit bizarre it is very useful to historians because not only does Athenaeus include a wealth of information about daily life but most usefully of all he includes extracts from earlier, often lost, Greek literature. And it’s one of these that sparked the interest of those 17thc garden writers.

Athenaeus writes that “Juba, king of Mauretania mentions the citron in his History of Libya, asserting that among the Libyans it is called the Apple of Hesperia, whence Herakles brought to Greece the apples called, from their colour, golden.” Athenaeus’s text was “rediscovered” in the 16thc and republished several more times between then and the late 17thc.

That may sound pretty obscure but it’s the mention of the citron that’s important. Citron – or citrus medica to give its proper botanic name – is one of the original citrus species, thought to be native to the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, but seeds have been found at the ancient site of Nippur (present-day Iraq). which date back to 4000 BC. The medica part of its name is not related to medicine but instead to the former state of Media, [700-500BC] later became the kingdom of Persia. From those early sightings it spread around the eastern Mediterranean region, reaching Greece by the 4thc BC where it is called the “Median apple” by Theophrastus. [For more info about citron follow this link] But its not until the 17thc that cultivation of citrus in elite European gardens outside of Italy and the warmer Mediterranean region began to be taken seriously, and several books are published about the history and cultivation of citrus plants.

The first image in this post [copied again on the left] shows clearly how the story of Herakles and the golden apples was adapted and adopted by these 17thc writers. It is the frontispiece to the first exhaustive study of the citrus family, and indeed of any single family of plants or animals. Written by a Jesuit priest Giovanni Battista Ferrari who was also gardener to Cardinal Barberini in Rome, the lengthily titled Hesperides, sive, De malorum aureorum cultura et usu is a lavishly illustrated folio published in 1646. It is made up of four sections, three of them named after one the nymphs tending the imaginary garden, and although its focuses mainly on the classification, of citrus Ferrari also covers their history, folklore, cultivation, and uses. Herakles features more than once with engravings of statues of the hero and coins with depicting his various labours.

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The information for the book took him quite a while to assemble since he began work in the 1630s, when, together with his friend and colleague, Cassiano dal Pozzo, the cardinal’s secretary, Ferrari wrote to many gardeners across Italy asking for details of the kinds of citrus fruit that grew in their area, and importantly also asked for drawings of them.

From these responses, some of which survive in Cassiano’s papers, Ferrari tried to classify the many varieties of citrus he had been told about. It was not an easy task because not only was the quality of drawing very variable but he also had the problem of different local names for the same fruit. To make things more difficult still citrus can easily cross-pollinate and even mutate so the even today taxonomists can still find it problematic.

Nevertheless Ferrari persisted and using their colour, texture, and seeds, as well as their flowers and leaves as guides, he sorted all of his examples into one of three groups: citrons, oranges and lemons. It was according to David Freedberg the leading authority on the subject, ‘one of the most important attempts at the classification of any single genus of fruit before Linnaeus’ (Freedberg, ‘Ferrari on the Classification of Oranges and Lemons’, p. 291).

Why was this significant? This was the time when cabinets of curiosities were spreading beyond a tiny group of royal and super-rich collectors , and becoming more commonplace amongst the aristocracy and wider wealthy elite. With the advent of primitive greenhouses gardens could serve as a botanical and outdoor extension to the collectors cabinet indoors . Citrus trees held pride of place among such collections of rare and exotic plants.

The second section of the book is about their cultivation. This was important because they were exotic, difficult to obtain, and expensive. Citrus required a great deal of skill to keep them flourishing, as well as being beautiful to look at, smell and eat. As with everything else collectors sought out novelty and difference, and as a result there was a particular interest in unusual fruit , even if we would today probably dismiss them as deformed. Citrus is particularly prone to such variation and odd-shaped fruit such the fingered citron, were known as bizzarrie and named by Ferrari as frutte che scherzano, or ‘joking fruit’.

Ferrari commented that “while we are horrified by monstrosities in human beings, we love them in fruit”.

A s we saw in the recent post about aquilegias, gardening and botanical books of this period often saw little difference between science and art, and so mixed factual information about plants with stories and poetry about them. Ferrari did the same and the first section of his Hesperides included all sorts of other random information about citrus, including stories which he thought explained the abnormalities and curiosities he saw in the fruits. Most of his explanations followed on from the another familiar pattern in classical mythology – the transformation of tragic characters into plants. In fact the deformities are usually caused by the action of a mite on the flower bud. This opening section was illustrated by allegorical images from well-known artists of the day, including Nicolas Poussin who was a friend of Cassiano.

Despite its botanical significance the book would only be of interest to Latin-speaking taxonomists and specialists if it wasn’t for the illustrations. Whereas in many early books illustrations were few and far between, and a nice, but usually non-essential addition, to the text, in Hesperides most of the the 80 plates are an essential and integral aspect of Ferrari’s classification system. The book simply would not work without them and they are an early sign of the growing importance of visual observation in understanding the world.

But more than that, the illustrations were not merely drawings but individual studies of citrus fruits — lemons, oranges, limes, citrons, and antiquated citrus varieties — often very detailed showing not just the fruit but the flowers and even cross-sections and all tied up with ribbons! The engravings were so attractive that they have often been removed from the books, and hand-coloured, and used as decorative prints.

The engravings were mostly done by Cornelius Bloemaert with others by Johann Friedrich Greuter, and are notable for their meticulous detail. They were based on paintings by Vincenzo Leonardi, commissioned by Ferrari’s friend Cassiano who gradually amassed a large collection of detailed drawings of the natural world, from fruit and flowers, to animals, fossils, and geological specimens which he made available to other interested scholars and which became known as his Paper Museum. Sold by his heirs to the Pope Clement XI in 1762 a large part of it was bought for George III and is now in the Royal Collection while most of the rest ended up at the Institut de France in Paris. A comprehensive catalogue of the collection in thirty-four volumes is in progress of publication under the title The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo.

But Ferrari was not the only garden writer to be inspired by the Garden of the Hesperides and its Golden apples as, since I have reached my word limit, we shall see in another post soon

For more information about Ferrari’s Hesperides good places to start are: David Freeburg’s ‘Cassiano, Ferrari and their Drawings of Citrus Fruit’ in Freedberg and Baldini, Citrus Fruit (1997); ‘Ferrari on the Classification of Oranges and Lemons’, in Cropper, Perini, & Solinas (eds.), Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII, (1992) and for the general background on the growing importance of visual imagesThe Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History, ( 2002). Also Helena Atlee’s The Land Where Lemons Grow (2014)

Source: https://gardencourte.com
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