Planting the Apple core

Planting the Apple core is the quiet continuation of Digory’s choice to bring the fruit home: after the Apple has helped his mother recover, its buried core grows into a tree whose lasting magic carries Narnia’s influence into the human world. The act transforms a remnant of healing into a living bridge between worlds, and ultimately gives its wood a role in later Narnian adventures.

The Core After the Healing

After Digory peeled the Apple and gave it to his mother piece by piece, she fell into a natural, gentle sleep—the rest she had wanted most. He kissed her, took the core from the room, and buried it in the back garden that evening. The sequence joins the intimate work of caring for his mother to the planting: the fruit has been used for its immediate purpose, but Digory does not discard what remains.

The next morning, the doctor called her case extraordinary and said it was like a miracle, though he withheld his full opinion to avoid raising false hopes. About a week later her recovery was certain; within a fortnight she could sit in the garden. The tree’s growth began in the same ground where the core had been buried, while the household itself gradually brightened as her health returned.

A Tree Between Worlds

When Digory and Polly later returned to bury the magic rings, the spot was already marked by something growing well above the ground. It had not visibly shot up as Narnian trees had, but its emergence made the core’s transformation unmistakable. They buried the rings in a circle around it, placing the instruments of world-travel around the new growth.

The tree matured into a fine tree, but its English setting limited what its fruit could do. Growing far from Aslan’s voice and Narnia’s young air, it did not produce apples capable of reviving a dying woman as the original fruit had revived Digory’s mother. Its apples were nevertheless more beautiful than any others in England and very good for health, though not fully magical. The distinction preserves both continuity and difference: the tree carries the Apple’s inheritance, but does not reproduce Narnia’s power unchanged.

The Tree’s Legacy

The connection endured beneath the tree’s ordinary appearance. Its sap, as the narrator describes it, never forgot the Narnian tree to which it belonged. At times it moved mysteriously when there was no wind; the narrator suggests that the English tree might quiver in response to high winds rocking its counterpart in Narnia. The possibility makes the planted tree a living correspondence between distant places, not merely a source of unusually fine fruit.

When Digory was middle-aged, a great storm blew the tree down. By then he was a famous scholar and traveller, and the old Ketterley house belonged to him. Unable to bear having the timber simply chopped for firewood, he had part of it made into a wardrobe for his country house. Although Digory himself never discovered the wardrobe’s magical properties, someone else did. The tree grown from the buried core thus became the material beginning of the later comings and goings between Narnia and the human world.