Simple or Complex

Sometime in the late 1860s, at Eastwood on the edge of Sydney, Maria Ann Smith threw the cores of some French crab apples onto a heap near the creek at the bottom of her farm. Apples don't grow true from seed. Every pip is a new cross, most of them sour and small, and a farmer who wants a known apple grafts one rather than plants one. A seedling came up out of the heap anyway, and Smith let it grow. It gave a green apple, hard and tart, that kept for months.

Nobody planned that apple. It came out of the least orderly corner of an orchard, a heap of discards where anything might come up and nearly everything that did was worthless.

Then her neighbors did the other thing. They cut scions from her tree and grafted them onto rootstock, row after row, every tree a clone of that one pip. Grafting is the opposite of a heap: no surprises, the same apple every time, an orchard simple enough to plan a harvest around. Smith died in 1870 without seeing much of it. It was the grafters who carried Granny Smith's seedling to every continent.

Most people, most of the time, ask for simple. They want to know what will arrive in the box, what the rule is, what tomorrow looks like. That isn't a failing. A society made entirely of people chasing chance seedlings would starve waiting on the one good apple in ten thousand. The people who want simple are the ones who keep the orchard producing, who take what works and make it reliable, repeatable, and cheap enough to reach a stranger.

Best fruit still comes from the heap. Nearly every apple in a market today traces back to a tree that came up where nobody planted it, and some farmer chose to leave standing. The people drawn to complexity, who let odd things grow and tolerate a mess for the sake of what might come of it, are the ones who find what the simplifiers will later spread.

The two need each other, and trouble starts when either end runs the whole orchard. Grafting only from grafts, in a few generations the apple becomes a red, mealy picture of an apple, uniform and dull. Leaving everything to the heap gives a field of crabs and one tree nobody propagated.

Simple and complex lie along a single line, and a single line has no third place off to one side where the question settles. Nobody stands wholly at either end of it. Smith let one odd seedling stand, and her neighbors who grafted it in rows were wagering on an apple nobody had tasted ten years before. Each grower finds a place somewhere along the line, nearer the heap in one season and nearer the graft in the next, and a free society doesn't fix where anyone stands on it.

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A note on how this piece was written: the idea and its direction are ours. The sentences were drafted with AI assistance, then edited by hand.