Garden Spells

The apple tree serves as a symbol of the magical elements in the novel, indicating a world where plants can have special properties and impacts. The apple tree’s active, seemingly sentient presence indicates how these properties can be consciously used or distributed to manipulate a person’s feelings and, by extension, their emotions, contributing to the theme of The Appropriate Exercise of Talent. Given the fortune-telling properties of its fruit, the tree also functions as a kind of foreshadowing in the novel; just as when Evanelle gives gifts to people, the apple tree’s efforts to dole out its apples to a specific target signal that something is about to happen. The apple tree also represents the Waverley family, indicating with its rootedness their longevity in the town and representing the particular brand of Waverley magic.

Claire describes the tree this way: “It wasn’t very tall, but it grew long and sideways. Its limbs stretched out like a dancer’s arm and the apples grew at the very ends, as if holding the fruit in its palms. It was a beautiful old tree, the gray bark wrinkled and molting in places” (36-37). It isn’t explained how or when the Waverleys discovered that eating an apple gives someone a vision of the most important event in their life, but their efforts to keep other people from eating the tree allow the novel to debate the appropriate exercise of talent and whether the ability to know the most important event of one’s life is a privilege or a danger.