Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape

Chapter 3.Apples: Core Issues

Fig. 38. Sievers’ crab apple (Malus sieversii Roem.) 1. flowering branch 2. flower (longitudinal section) 3. petal 4. fruiting branch 5. fruit (longitudinal section) C H A P T E R T H R E E apples: core issues FRUIT: STRICTLY, THE RIPENED OVARY OF A PLANT AND ITS CONTENTS. MORE LOOSELY, THE TERM IS EXTENDED TO THE RIPENED OVARY AND SEEDS TOGETHER WITH ANY STRUCTURE WITH WHICH THEY ARE COMBINED , E.G., THE APPLE (A POME) IN WHICH THE TRUE FRUIT (CORE) IS SURROUNDED BY FLESH DERIVED FROM THE FLORAL RECEPTACLE. Michael Allaby, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Botany As we filed into the slightly apple-scented room, we were each given two sheets of paper. The first listed the thirty-six apple varieties we would taste. The second was for our ratings: ‘‘zero represents unpalatable and nine denotes an ecstatic taste experience.’’ Swaar was my ecstasy. And Newtown Pippin, which my notes describe as sweet but interestingly complex, was my second choice. I was with the majority in picking Swaar, a heavy American apple with a rich, some say nutty, taste. First raised along New York’s Hudson River around 1804, it was ranked second by the almost fifty participants at the 1995 Monticello Apple Tasting. Virginia Gold was first. The Newtown Pippin, the apple that launched the American export industry when Benjamin Franklin introduced it in England along with its cousin the American Pippin, were ranked twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth, respectively (three places behind Mother, with its evanescent, aromatic taste). So much for one taste fits all. Fortunately, however, with 7,500 apple varieties available, there is an ecstatic experience—probably several ecstatic experiences—awaiting every palate. Think of it. At the rate of the prescribed apple a day, it would take one person twenty years and two hundred days to try them all. Where to begin? With the sepia-tinted names like Westfield Seek-No-Further, White Winter Pearmain, Roxbury Russet, and Esopus Spitzenburg? The Roxbury Russet, Esopus Spitzenburg, and the Newton Pippin were all grown at Monticello during Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime. Our most horticulturally minded president, according to Allen Lacy, Jefferson wrote that ‘‘the greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,’’1 and he worked to do just that, experimenting with Italian grapes and strawberries, Chinese silk trees, and French figs and endive. But not French apples. ‘‘They have no apple here to compare with our Newtown pipping,’’ he wrote while in France.2 9. T. Ch. Yu, Taxonomy of Fruit Trees in China, chapter 8. (From the collections of the Missouri Botanical Garden Library) Or start with the new? Pick a variety like the dark red Liberty, named for the ‘‘fruit breeders’ goal of helping to liberate fruit growers from endless rounds of spraying.’’3 Introduced in 1978, Liberty—like Empire, Cortland, Macoun, and Jonagold—was bred at Cornell’s prolific New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York, near the facility that houses the world’s largest apple collection, the USDA Plant Genetics Resources Unit. Or just pick out the ones that sound fascinating? Granny Smith, for example, appeals to me because of the story. ‘‘Granny’’ Anne Smith emigrated from England to Ryde, Australia, in 1838. About thirty years later she discovered a young apple tree growing where she had ‘‘tipped out [the] last of some apples brought back from Sydney.’’4 Smith tried the fruit, found it was good for both cooking and eating, and thus was born the apple that bears her name. Discovery as a household occupation. For most of us, however, our association with apples began in infancy before we could make choices—apples are usually the first fruit introduced to babies. And so it is with the history of apples, which predates human evolution. ‘‘It is remarkable,’’ Henry David Thoreau wrote in Wild Apples, ‘‘how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of the Rosacea, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the Labiatae, or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe.’’5 Although the product of outdated science (Rosacea does not include the Mints and Grasses, and the order significantly predates human evolution with the earliest fossil records of the family appearing in...