The idea occurred to me while on a tour of the Cambridge Botanical Gardens given by their charismatic director. In his company, clouds of stories emanated from even the most unremarkable shrub. One plant, a large apple tree near the entrance, stood out. It grew, we were told, from a cutting taken from a four-hundred-year-old apple tree in the garden of Isaac Newton’s family home, Woolsthorpe Manor. It was the only apple tree that grew there and was old enough to have been around when Newton formulated his theory of universal gravitation. If any tree had dropped an apple that inspired Newton,
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