Priyanka Kumar, "Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit" (Island Press, 2025)

Apr 6, 2026

Priyanka Kumar, a naturalist, filmmaker, and author exploring orchards and human relationships with the wild. She recalls Himalayan orchard childhoods and a wild Santa Fe apple that launched her journey. Topics include lost apple diversity, apples as links between species, orchards as biodiversity havens, and tasting as a pathway back to the wild.

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ANECDOTE

Childhood Among Himalayan Apple Trees

Priyanka Kumar grew up in Himalayan foothills among biodiverse, forest-like apple orchards and remembers weaving under towering mother apple trees from age two.
Those childhood memories drove her lifelong fascination and motivated her to investigate why apples hold deep cultural and sensory power.

INSIGHT

Apples Evolved As Animal Partnerships

Apples evolved to attract animals over deep time: small fruits for birds, then larger fruits to lure megafauna like bears that disperse seeds.
Finding feral apple trees near Santa Fe revealed how these trees sustain diverse animals from hummingbirds to bears, reframing orchard edges as biodiversity havens.

ADVICE

Write Nature To Be Visceral And Accessible

Structure nature writing to be sensory and accessible so readers can viscerally experience places and care about conservation.
Kumar organized her book intuitively by months to take readers on a seasonal, experiential journey into orchards and micro-wilds.

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As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit--especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree--and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit (Island Press, 2026), Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature.

Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple's storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello fruitery.

The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an "apple a day." Kumar shows how--if we follow untamed paths--the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild.

Priyanka Kumar is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and the author. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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