Apple Moon

Moon cycle:

• New Moon: 21st September 2025
• Full Moon: 7th October 2025
• New Moon: 21st October 2025

Traditionally, the October moon is known in the northern hemisphere as the Hunter’s Moon. This was a time of slaughtering animals and preserving their meats in preparation for the coming winter. Native American names for this moon include Drying Rice Moon, Falling Leaves Moon, and Freezing Moon. It is certainly a time for storing; as we pass the autumn equinox, you might spot grey squirrels digging holes in parks and gardens burying sweet chestnuts or hazelnuts, and look out for jays burying acorns, too.

Why Apple Moon?

Last full moon, I attended a conference in Belgrade where I found myself on the banks of the Danube, among hundreds of chattering academics queuing for the evening food. Suddenly, one of our group exclaimed, “Is that the moon?!” Behind a string of white light bulbs, over the yawning black of the river, hung a plump, russet ball. We were just two days into a waning gibbous moon, so it was almost full and now turning a bloody orange as it rose slowly through the city dust. Despite the light pollution (photography was futile), we found ourselves standing in awe. Within minutes the moon had risen above the flimsy strings of lights, now majestic, golden, delicious.

Before putting my phone away, I noticed that the last photograph, taken two days earlier, was of our own apple tree, heavy with ripe fruit, as red as any Belgrade moonrise. By coincidence, one traditional name for this moon that becomes full in October, is the Pagan Blood Moon or Sanguine Moon (in this context, sanguine means blood-red).

This sense of appleness led me to shelve my plan of writing a blog about the yew tree and how its red berries appear at this time of year, adorning church yards across the land, and instead I turned it over to the apple.

Apple backstories

As it happens, the person who first noticed the moon by the Danube that night, was Dilraba Anayatova from Kazakhstan. Having recently completed her PhD in the USA, she was here to present her research on ‘reimagining rural education’ in her home country. Dilraba’s talk mentioned that Kazakhstan was the original home of the apple, a claim supported by DNA testing that shows the primary ancestor of the domesticated apple (Malus domestica) is the ancient Malus sieversii, which is native to the Tian Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan. Close by lies the former Kazakh capital of Almaty, whose ancient name translates as ‘Father of the Apples’. Over millennia, apples found their way by seeds passing through birds and mammals, across Asia as far as present-day Syria. Although primitive varieties have probably been in Britain for thousands of years, it was the Romans who distributed them purposefully throughout their empire, Britain included, together with their knowledge of grafting.

Cato the Elder (234-149 BC) wrote a treatise on the art of grafting, attaching a cutting (or scion) of a preferred variety onto a parent tree or rootstock. In this way apples were selected for their taste, texture, appearance or other properties such as keeping ability or pest resistance. Originally, grafting could be seen as simply helping evolution along as people would spot a tree or branch of slightly unusual apples (such chance differences are known as a sport) and would graft them on to another tree to propagate them. This is necessary because growing an apple from pips does not ensure that the same properties will be reproduced; that said, pip-grown varieties, known as pippins, are popular.

It was Herefordshire horticulturalist, Thomas Andrew Knight (1759–1838), who took the selective cross-cultivation of apples to the next level. His research, involving hundreds of varieties, has informed apple production and the cider industry ever since. For centuries before Knight’s work, the most common varieties consumed in England were the Pearmain and the Costard cooking apple. Costards were sold in 15th Century London by costard-mongers, hence the expression costermonger came to be used for any street vendor.

Apple ecology

Apple trees are host to an abundant variety of flora, fauna and fungi. Many are seen as pests, such as the infamous codling moth that burrows into the fruit leaving a gift of maggoty caterpillars while fungal infestations such as canker and scab attack the bark and fruit respectively. Mature orchards can provide homes for bryophytes, that is, mosses and liverworts that live on the tree without harming it. Plants that hitch a lift in this way are known as epiphytes, while parasites feed from and weaken the host; mistletoe is perhaps the most well-known parasite. Fallen apples will of course attract numerous birds and insects including thrushes and wasps. Over the last two years, the European Orchard Bee (Osmia cornuta), a rare, ‘solitary’ bee has been found nesting in the dead woody stems of English apple trees.

Apple or not?

Whether the forbidden fruit shared between Adam and Eve was supposed to be an apple that we would recognise, is debateable given that ‘apple’ was a generic term used for any fruit (and nuts), other than berries, until as late as the 17th Century. The Old English term for dates was fingeræppla or ‘finger-apples’ while the banana was known in Middle English as appel of paradis. Even today the French term for potatoes is pomme de terre, literally ‘apple of the earth’. The Ancient Greeks did a similar thing with melon. The species name for apple Malus is derived from the Greek for melon; like apple, it’s generally a round thing. The expression ‘apple of your eye’ simply describes the pupil, which speakers of Old English thought of as a solid globe in one’s eye rather than a hole.

Apples under threat

In centuries past, stored apples helped to sustain the poor during winter when fresh produce was scarce; today our apples need our care. While the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, Kent grows 2,131 varieties of apple, many are threatened. This long-term decline in diversity has been hastened by supermarkets that demand standardised produce with a long shelf-life; texture and flavour are secondary concerns. The Beauty of Bath, for example, is a juicy apple that’s full of flavour if fresh but it doesn’t transport well so is no longer commercially available. We are now familiar with only a handful of varieties, mostly developed in Australia (Pink Lady, Granny Smith’s) and New Zealand (Braeburn and Gala).

Climate change is also taking its toll as apple trees need to ‘chill’ during the winter to retain stored energy that allows them to burst into leaf and their distinctive pink and white blossom in spring. Perfect chilling takes place below 6C and above freezing and most apple trees need about 1,000 hours at these temperatures. With years growing successively warmer, apples have to respire in winter using up energy stores leading to fewer apples.

In the heartlands of the original Malus sieversii in Kazakhstan and China, the species has been marked as vulnerable by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as it has declined due to human activities and natural disasters.

Darker stories

Back to Dilabra’s presentation on Kazakhstan, she reminded us of the famine of 1930–1933, created by Soviet collectivisation when the semi-nomadic Kazakhs were forced to stay in one place, thus their animals exhausted available grazing and distant fruits could no longer be harvested.

Together with the earlier Soviet-induced famine of 1919-1922, the colonial powers caused the death of half of the Kazakh population. Vast swathes of apple trees were felled and the remaining crop exported, together with grain production, to feed Russia’s urban populations. At that time the taking of an apple was a bold act of rebellion and sharing a stolen apple could mean life – or death. We may think of such inhumanity as a thing of the past but the apple orchards of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip were an early casualty of Israel’s onslaught, now widely recognised as genocide. There is no apple harvest in Gaza this year.

When you next hold an apple to your mouth, take a moment to savour the privilege before the crunch.

Appley Activities

(With thanks to Paula Owens and David Dixon for these.)

Resources and useful websites

• Find out more about orchards and what they are –
• For more on how to grow apples and establish an orchard in urban or rural settings, visit The Orchard Project. They are holding a Community Orchard Summit at Gray’s Inn Road in central London on 18th October, 2025.

Dr Paul Vare is Chair of the NAEE Trustees; in his day job he is EdD Course Leader at the University of Gloucestershire.