Apples and The Botany of Desire

I'm currently reading Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire. I'm in the second section that relates to flowers in general and the tulip in particular. However this post concerns itself with the first section of the book, the section which focuses on apples.

I never really thought about it much but if I had, I'd have probably assumed that apple trees were grown from seeds. Oddly enough it turns out that's not usually the case. You see, apples are a very sexually expressive species. The progeny vary extensively from the parents. So you can have a tree that bears great apples and find that not a single seed from that tree results in a commercially viable apple tree.

If the story stopped there you'd probably have never eaten a single apple--and not even have heard of them. The apple tree first appeared in Kazakhstan, a former republic of the Soviet Union, where it still grows wild. The wide variety of characteristics contained in the seeds has allowed the apple tree to adapt to local conditions in a wide variety of geographical locations. This is relatively rare in the botanical world. Most plants have fairly restricted growing zones. As a result, traders between Asia and Europe were able to transport the seeds across both continents with viable trees resulting.

That amazing ability to adjust, in a sense, to local conditions has allowed the apple tree to spead across the whole world. But that same ability works against our producing consistant crops of apples since every tree will be different from all the preexisting apple trees.

Obviously a solution has been found and that's branch grafting. By binding a branch from the desirable tree to a branch of some run-of-the-mill apple tree you can force the hosting tree to produce the type of apples you want. That techniques been around for over a thousand years. A more recent technique is budding, which is a type of cloning. These techniques allow people to grow as many apples of a particular varietal as they want regardless of what the hosting tree would normally produce.

This is critical because until recently apples were not usually eaten. They just didn't taste very good. So apples were usually used as food for livestock or ground up and used for producing cider. Hard cider, while not as strong as wine, was made everywhere apples were grown and this was the easiest way to produce alcohol locally. Depending on apple trees for alcohol production was an important factor in their rapid spread. Nothing like a potential good time to drive the creation of orchards all over. Think Johnny Appleseed here.

One of the most prominent cultivars today, the Red Delicious, was developed in the US. It was a seedling on the farm of Jesse Hiatt in Peru, Iowa around 1890. In 1893 Hiatt sent in 4 apples from this tree--he named them Hawkeyes--to a contest sponsered by the Stark Brothers Nursery. His apples won handily but due to a clerical problem his name was lost. As you know from the explanation above, the Stark Brothers having the apples didn't help much since they needed the original tree to graft from. This resulted in a desperate one year long search across the country for the person that sent in those apples. Thinking about it reminds me of the Disney cartoon of the Prince using the glass slipper to look for Cinderella.

In any case, Hiatt was eventually found and CM Stark bought rights to the tree and renamed it the Delicious. 20 years later it was renamed the Red Delicious when the Stark Brothers discovered a yellow apple of similar quality and named it the Golden Delicious. That tree was discovered in Clay County, West Virginia.

So that's my story about apples.