Readers who enjoyed learning about Vavilov’s work in Where Our Food Comes From will be charmed by  Pomegranate Roads, Dr Gregory Levin’s memoir of a life devoted to pomegranates and creating the world’s largest pomegranate collection in Turkmenistan. Published a couple of years ago, we have only heard of it recently, but copies are still available from US Amazon.

Dr Gregory Levin was one of Vavilov’s disciples, although a generation later, putting into practice the Russian scientist's vision of exploring and collecting the great diversity of food crop plants growing in the wild and in isolated settlements untouched by modern agriculture. Levin’s speciality was the pomegranate, of which he amassed an incredible 1,117 accessions at Garrigala Experimental Agricultural Station in the Submar Valley of the south west Kopet Dagh mountains, Turkmenistan, close to the border with Iran. Vavilov had visited the Submar Valley several times between 1916 and 1936 declaring this to be ‘one of the richest subtropical regions for fruiting plants’; in particular a ‘creation crucible’, a  centre of diversity for the pomegranate and also for almonds, grapes and walnuts.  The Garrigala station was established in 1930 and one of fourteen such centres spread across the Soviet Union. Levin arrived in 1961 when there were just 64 pomegranates in the collection and spent the next forty years plant hunting for Garrigala and maintaining and studying its expanding collection, which also included over 4,000 grapes, 400 almonds, other nuts, olives, persimmons, apricots and jujubes.

Countless collecting excursions, gathering cuttings for growing at the centre, were made by Levin to the Narli Gorges: ten gorges, five in each of the Submar and more southerly Chandir Valleys, that take their name from the Turkmen word for pomegranate, on account of the thousands of wild bushes that grew there. In the milder climate, because of its higher elevation, of the Ai-Dere or Bear Gorge, lay rich sources of other material as well as the finest cultivated plantations of pomegranates in Submar. Levin describes a magical trip, walking first  through groves of walnuts, then thickets of blackberries, hawthorn and wild grapes, picnicking under a plane tree near an old settlement  and climbing higher through slopes of wild almond trees to stop at an abandoned garden in which local varieties of plums, pears and almonds grew. According to an account written a century earlier the Nuhur people annually harvested hundreds of pounds of wild, bitter and sweet almonds in the Ai-Dere Gorge and although this no longer happened, Levin found walnuts remained a precious crop, the giant trees each named and identified by the local community - ‘Black’, ‘Royal’, ‘Best’ and ‘Thin-Shell Nut’ - perfectly illustrating the first steps in selecting varieties from the wild. 

Every year he undertook a long, ambitious expedition - one year going west to the Caucasus mountains and Azerbaijan, where another pomegranate collection was maintained, the next travelling to central Asia as far east as the Amu-Darya River on the borders of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and to the  Western Pamirs and Tien Shans. He brings alive the excitement, romance and dangers of plant hunting. In pursuit of pomegranates on one perilous climb in the Tupolang River Gorge in the Hissar range in Uzbekistan he joined a group of foresters who were carrying sacks of flour on donkeys to their mountain settlements. The  path, hung high up in the mountains overlooking the river, was very narrow and at places only an ‘overing’, a swaying platform made from a lattice work of poles and stakes overlaid with branches, where the donkeys’ legs would often fall through. There were at least 25 ‘overings’  to negotiate before they reached the first settlement, but on the second day he made the exciting discovery of wild pomegranate populations not merely abandoned cultivated bushes as formerly thought in the Tupolang Gorge.
     
He finds and selects soft seeded pomegranates and ones that do not crack, both valuable commercial features, and tracks down pomegranates with pink flowers and even yellow petals instead of the usual red blooms and a ‘black’, in fact violet blue, skinned and fleshed pomegranate. The centre attracts visitors and material from the collection is dispatched all over the world - Garrigala pomegranates make up 51% of the University of Davis collection in California.  But  the Garrigala collection, the world’s largest for pomegranates, became endangered and may now be greatly depleted or worse. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and independence of Turkmenistan in 1991 came a financial crisis. The Turkmenistan government gradually cut back funding and with reduced staff and resources the collections were at risk. Levin spoke of their plight on the BBC World Service but, unable to tolerate the situation anymore, in 2001 he left with his wife to live in Israel, where their son had earlier settled. Yet politics intervene again: by moving to Israel he was cut off  from a former contact in Tunisia and other Muslim countries where pomegranates are widely grown and to his dismay the pomegranates that he sent to Israel, while thriving, were identified by numbers instead of the names he had given to these selected, superior varieties making his successes inaccessible to other researchers wishing to propagate them.  

Levin interweaves the story of his own life with his passion for pomegranates, which does not always make for an easy, or logical read, but nevertheless a fascinating narrative. And he does not neglect the pomegranate’s long history as a symbol of fertility and plenty, a decorative icon in art and  literature, and its current fashionable medicinal benefits. He remembers how they used to make pomegranate juice at Garrigala and the wild pomegranates colouring the roofs of Turkmen homes during the summer as they dried for use as a flavouring, turshi, meaning sour. 

Now tremendously saddened by events and far from his beloved mountains, at the Jewish festival, Tu bishvat, the ‘New Year of Trees’ in late January when the first almonds come into flower and pomegranates along with other fruits are served, Levin quotes the traditional saying ‘ May it be your design, Oh Almighty, that our achievements multiply like pomegranate seeds’.  I hope that he can realise his ambition to write more about his work, the Garrigala collections, and his expeditions. At least we have this absorbing account, although only through the determination of  California journalist, Barbara Baer, who heard Levin’s BBC radio appeal, tracked him down in Israel, encouraged him to write and saw the manuscript through translation and publication with the help of  ‘Planet Pomegranate’, Levin’s name for a supportive international circle of pomegranate lovers. 

Joan Morgan

Pomegranate Roads; A Soviet Botanist’s Exile fom Eden by Dr. Gregory M. Levin; translated from the Russian by Margaret Hopstein, edited by Barbara L. Baer; published 2006 by Floreant Press, California; $19.95; pp183, illustrated with colour plates and black and white photos.

For a review of Where Our Food Comes From  see: http://www.fruitforum.net/following-in-vavilovs-footsteps-in-search-of-foodcrops.htm