The apple’s biggest break came with the opening of the frontier, as Thoreau recognized: “Our Western emigrant is still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his load. At least a million apple-trees are thus set farther westward this year than any cultivated ones grew last year.” Quite a few of those seeds were planted by John Chapman, a.k.a. “Johnny Appleseed,” who traveled the Ohio Valley a few years ahead of most settlers, establishing seedling nurseries throughout the region to meet the settlers’ needs.

 

John Bunker, the founder of Maine’s Fedco Trees and one of the foremost champions of heirloom apples, likes to call this period the Great American Agricultural Revolution. “When this all happened,” he says, “there was no USDA, no land-grant colleges, no pomological societies. This was just grassroots. Farmers being breeders.” A typical homestead might have a dozen different apple varieties, ensuring a source of fruit and drink throughout the year, as well as vinegar for preservation. Eventually, there were more than 16,000 different named apples in the nursery catalogs, though some of these were undoubtedly multiple names for the same apple.

 

Then industrial agriculture crushed that world. As orchards grew bigger and bigger, the small family orchard became unprofitable. Prohibition made cider apples useless. National supermarkets and distributors demanded consistent supplies of identical apples that would be familiar to everyone, and the giant orchards springing into being, mostly out west, were happy to comply. Of those thousands of 19th-century varieties, a mere six (Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith, McIntosh) came to dominate the market. Not long ago, three-quarters of the apples grown in America were Red Delicious, an apple bred for its intense red color at the expense of texture and taste. Every tree was genetically identical, monocropped on a massive scale in the sun-soaked deserts of eastern Washington. American consumers brought this disaster upon themselves by consistently choosing the redder apple over the tastier one.

 

As more and more families moved to the city, fewer had exposure to any apples except the ones in the supermarket. Children never knew that an apple could be anything more than a ball of red or green cardboard. The Age of the Apple had ended.

 

The Apple Sleuths

 

But apple trees are very patient beings. It’s nothing for them to wait a 100 years, even 200, asking for nothing, and, like the Giving Tree in Shel Silverstein’s book, waiting patiently for the boy to return. There is a bent old Black Oxford tree in Hallowell, Maine, that is 214 years old and still gives a crop of midnight-purple apples each fall.

 

In places like northern New England, the Appalachian Mountains, the Finger Lakes, and the Ohio Valley—agricultural hotspots that have thus far escaped the bulldozer—the old centenarians and double-centenarians hang on, on abandoned farms, or near the sign for the subdivision that went up around them, or in the orchards of a handful of preservationists who kept quietly grafting the old trees, just because. Often their identity is lost on the present landowners. “That great period of agriculture is now just far enough into the past that the last few of the old, old varieties are dying out,” John Bunker says. “Are they going to be important in the future? We don’t know. But they might be. And if we’re going to save this stuff and give it to future generations, we’d better do it now.”

 

Bunker’s love affair with apples dates to 1972, when he began farming a hardscrabble plot of land in the town of Palermo after graduating from Colby College. That first fall, he noticed the apples ripening all over town, trees that had been started decades ago and were now in their primes, yet mostly went ignored. So he began picking them. “I felt like these trees I was finding in my town, and then eventually all over Maine and other places, were a gift to me by someone whom I had never met, who had no idea who I was, who had no idea that I was ever going to be. Over time, I started thinking, I got to come to earth and have this amazing experience of all these trees that were grown and bearing, and all these oldtimers who would take me out into their fields and show me things and take me on trips down these old roads. I would knock on somebody’s door, and next thing you know I’m eating with them. It was like gift after gift after gift. And I started thinking, Do I have any responsibilities with this? Or do I just soak it up and let it go?”

 

So he founded Fedco Trees, which specializes in rare heirlooms, the goal being to make them less rare. When he finds one of these links to a world more diverse and flavorful than our own, he grafts it onto rootstocks at the Fedco nursery and begins selling the trees a few years later. Over the past 30 years he has saved at least 80 varieties from oblivion. His forensic methods involve everything from studying the depth of the cavity around the stem, to checking the trunk for grafting scars, to poring over old nursery catalogs and historical records. He hangs “Wanted” posters at corner stores in the towns where the apples originated, hands them out at historical society meetings. A typical poster reads “WANTED ALIVE: NARRAGANSETT APPLE. Last Seen in York County!...Originated on the farm of Jacob H. Harmon, Buxton, Me., in 1873.” Then, after a drawing and description of the apple, “If you Know the Whereabouts of This Apple Please Contact Fedco.”

 

One of Bunker’s best finds was the Fletcher Sweet, which he knew originated in the Lincolnville area. In 2002, he met a group from the Lincolnville Historical Society. They had never heard of the apple, but they knew of a part of Lincolnville called Fletchertown, which, like so many other old villages in northern New England, had since been reclaimed by the forest. The society posted a note in the local paper saying it was looking for an old apple called a “Fletcher.” A 79-year-old named Clarence Thurlow called the paper and said, “I’ve never heard of a Fletcher, but I know where there’s a Fletcher Sweet.”

 

Thurlow led Bunker to the dirt intersection that had once been the heart of Fletchertown, pointed to an ancient, gnarled tree, and said, “That’s the tree I used to eat apples from when I was a child.” The tree was almost entirely dead. It had lost all its bark except for a two-inch-wide strip of living tissue that rose up the trunk and led to a single living branch about eighteen feet off the ground. There was no fruit. Bunker took a handful of shoots and grafted them to rootstock at his farm. A year later, both Clarence Thurlow and the tree died, but the grafts thrived, and, a few years later, bore the first juicy, green Fletcher Sweet apples the world had seen in years. “It’s a great apple,” says Bunker. “It has a super-duper distinctive flavor.” Today, Bunker has returned young Fletcher Sweet trees to Lincolnville.

 

This is the magic of apples. You can’t take a graft of Clarence Thurlow and grow a new one, but his tree was easily duplicated and returned to contemporary cultural life. Today, I can take a bite out of a Fletcher Sweet and know exactly what Clarence Thurlow was experiencing as a boy 80 years ago. I can chomp into a Newtown Pippin and understand why Thomas Jefferson exulted to James Madison from Paris that “they have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”

 

The New Golden Age

 

While John Bunker was doing his thing in Maine, others were doing the same in different regions of the country—tracking down tantalizing leads, grafting old trees, swapping specimens with their English counterparts, expanding their preservation orchards. Predictably, what they were doing had been so uncool for so long that it suddenly became very cool. We were all so bored by the sameness of supermarket fruit that the sight and taste of iconoclastic apples hit us like a jolt of tart cider.

 

Around the time I bought my farmhouse, my local co-op became filled each fall with the craziest collection of apples I’d ever seen. There were tiny ones and russet ones and those unmistakable Sheepsnoses, and they carried names straight out of a Dickens novel: Esopus Spitzenburg, Ashmead’s Kernel, Belle de Boskoop, Ribston Pippin. The apples were being grown by a gnomic man named Zeke Goodband, who sported an earring, a waterfall of a beard like a Chinese sage, and a lifelong devotion to apples. Zeke had transformed Scott Farm, an orchard in southern Vermont that was the home of Rudyard Kipling, into one of the great working heirloom orchards in the country. The 80 varieties at Scott Farm are, to me, as fine a collection of artistic masterpieces as you’d find in any museum, just as moving and thought-provoking, and Zeke is a superb curator. But the difference between Zeke’s apples and museum pieces is that they are a living part of the culture. You can take a chunk out of a Pinova, but that’s discouraged with a Picasso.

 

Zeke’s apples are doing for market shoppers throughout New England what Fedco Trees is doing for home gardeners: expanding our understanding of what an apple could be. That trend keeps gaining steam, and we are now in what I can confidently declare to be the Second Age of the Apple. We have more varieties of extraordinary apples within reach—through mail-order suppliers, farmers’ markets, pick-your-own orchards, and enlightened grocers like Whole Foods—than any people who have come before us. And by no means are they all heirlooms. The new generation of consumers has shown an enthusiasm for novel apples, and the commercial apple world has responded with an outpouring of creativity. Some of the newer stars of the produce aisle, like Gala and Honeycrisp, would have been as passionately embraced by our homesteading forebears as they have been by us. They are damned fine apples, and even if they were the product of controlled crosses at university breeding programs, they still came into existence in the old-fashioned way: As a seedling that proved its mettle over thousands of rivals.

 

In fact, as you look at apples and learn their stories, one of the things that will become clear is that each was a one-in-a-million shot. Nobody has planted seedling orchards since Johnny Appleseed’s time, so each tasty new variety represents a double miracle: first, that it was dealt a genetic royal flush; and second, that it survived long enough to produce fruit that somebody noticed. Thoreau recognized this a century and a half ago: “Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise.” To me, that gives every apple variety a storybook personality. It often took a hurricane or a switched-at-birth mix-up—some unlikely act of fate that set it on its own Dickensian arc—to give it a shot at all. Each apple prince is the hero of its own tale. Each has something different to say about being living creatures in the world.

 

If there is one particular lesson the apple has to teach us, it is that the world is full of endless possibilities.  Like the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown, the apple never met a landscape it didn’t relish, and like James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, it almost always says yes.