The Story of an Immigrant
In honor of the upcoming holiday, I thought I’d pay my respects to what is regarded as one of the most American of fruits; the apple. But is the apple really “American”?
The domesticated apple tree, or Malus domestica, is the descendant of a species of wild apple that can be found in the mountains of Kzakhstan that goes by the name of Malus sieversii. These stately wild trees can grow up to 60 feet tall, making our beloved orchard trees look like wiry bean stalks. These apple giants had fruits of all shapes and sizes, the best of which were likely picked up and eaten by travelers on the Silk Road. In doing this, humans acted as a part of the dispersal mechanism for these apple trees, taking the biggest and tastiest fruits along with them, scattering the seeds wherever they decided to toss the core.
Novel species of apple tree began to pop up all through Asia and into Europe, as seeds in the roadside apple cores grew into trees and hybridized with other apple tree species like the European crab. It’s unlikely that these hybrids produced palatable fruit, but they would be capitalized upon for the making of hard cider.
It took a little while to get really tasty fruit out of apple trees. Around 200 B.C., horticulturalists in China had discovered the art of “grafting”, a growing technique where one takes a slice of wood cut from a tree with desirable characteristics and grafts it into a notch cut in another tree. Eventually, the grafted region will grow and produce fruit that has the desirable qualities of the tree from whence it came. The Greeks and Romans readily took to this strategy, cultivating all sorts of apple varieties.
It wasn’t until the 1700s that early colonists brought apples to the New World, and even then the edible apple scene in America wasn’t anything too impressive. Grafted specimens shipped over from Europe died on the journey, faired poorly in the foreign soil, or perished in late spring cold snaps. The American crab, a native species of crab apple, also was not the greatest for the apple industry as it was bitter and barely edible. It wasn’t until the 1780s that apples began to do well on American soil as a result of an abandonment of the grafting method, and a return to simply putting seeds in the ground and letting them go. The European stock were allowed to freely propagate and hybridize with the natives, eventually leading to apple trees that were adapted to the climate of the American Northeast and bore delicious fruits.
The story of an immigrant.
Source
Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.
