The Great Apple Rush

One more posting on apples! Do you know what is so incredible about Johnny Appleseed and the apple story in America? Actually, John Chapman’s apples were neither the first nor by any stretch the best, for his were seedlings trees exclusively… The fact, simply, is this:

• Apples don’t “come true” from seeds – that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wants edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible – “sour enough to get a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream”, wrote Thoreau.

Every seed in an apple contains the genetic instructions for a completely new and different apple tree, one that, if planted, would bear only the most glancing resemblance to its parents. If not for grafting – the ancient technique of cloning trees – every apple in the world would be its own distinct variety, and it would be impossible to keep a good one going beyond the life span of that particular tree.

Joining a bud or shoot from one plant onto the roots or trunk of another plant so that the two parts will unite and grow together.

Chapman, somewhat perversely, would have nothing to do with grafted apples, “They can improve the apple in that way, but that is only a device of man, and it is wicked to cut up trees that way. The correct method is to select good seeds and plant them in good ground and God only can improve the apple.”

So, why did it succeed? In particular, how could the man have made a living selling spitters to Ohio settlers when there were already grafted trees bearing edible fruit for sale in Marietta. According to Pollan, Americans’ “inclination toward cider” is the only way to explain Chapman’s success.

It was the seeds, and the cider, that gave the apple the opportunity to discover by trial and error the precise combination of traits required to prosper the New World. From Chapman’s vast planting of nameless cider apple seeds came some of the great American cultivars of the nineteenth century.

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Whenever a tree growing in the midst of a planting of nameless cider apples somehow distinguished itself – for the hardiness of its constitution, the redness of its skin, the excellence of its flavor – it would promptly be named, grafted, publicized and multiplied. Through this simultaneous process of natural and cultural selection, the apples took up into themselves the very substance of America.

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In the years after John Chapman, America witnessed what has sometime called the Great Apple Rush. People soured the countryside for the next champion fruit…

And every farmer tended his cider orchard with an eye to the main chance: the apple that would hit it big. The discovery of a Golden Delicious (left) or Red Delicious (right) could bring an American fortune and even a measure of fame.

source: botany of desire