520: Stories Hidden in Old Apple Trees | Bunker & Little-Siebold

00:00 — Apples as Teachers: John Bunker’s Opening Reflection
01:26 — News Out and About in Ciderville
03:18 — eCiderNews: Pennsylvania Research and the Netherlands’ Cider Museum
05:55 — CiderFeast Boston and Recent UK Episodes
08:15 — Totally Cider Tours: UK and France 2027
10:49 — Video, Scott Farm, and Heirloom Apple Day
13:34 — John Bunker and Todd Little-Siebold Begin Their Presentation
14:44 — John Bunker: Place, Mobility, and the Apple Tree
24:02 — A 200-Year-Old Tree and the Future of Apple Genetics
28:17 — Saving Apple Stories and Lost Varieties
33:09 — Todd Little-Siebold: Joining the Search for Historic Apples
36:00 — Lost and Found: The Maine Heritage Orchard
37:39 — Maine Apple Camp and Collaborative Research
39:34 — Crowdsourced DNA Testing and Unknown Apples
40:23 — The French Grand-Mères of American Apples
45:44 — Early American Orchards and Apple History
48:40 — Rediscovering Drap d’Or de Bretagne
51:19 — Mystery Apples: Newtown Pippin and Peck’s Pleasant
55:06 — Foxwhelp and Historic Naming Errors
56:37 — Audience Q&A: Apple DNA Submissions
57:27 — The French Ancestry of English and American Apples
01:00:58 — Russian Apples, Genetic Diversity, and Unanswered Questions
01:04:01 — Closing Thanks and Supporting Cider Chat

Apple trees are really wonderful teachers, and they teach us about where we were, where we are now, and where we might be in the future. John Bunker has spent decades searching for and preserving historic apple trees. And as you just heard, he sees them as much more than a source of fruit. In this episode, 520 of Cider Chat, we’re at Scott Farm in Dummerston, Vermont, for the 23rd annual Heirloom Apple Day.

John will be joined by Todd Little-Seibold, historian professor at the College of the Atlantic, whose research explores the history and genetic ancestry of North American apples. Together, they take us into the fascinating world of old apple varieties, from apple trees that have survived for centuries, to [00:01:00] varieties whose names have been lost, and the surprising discoveries being made through DNA research.

Hello, my name is Ria Windcaller, and I am the producer and cider emcee of this weekly podcast, where we speak with makers, cider enthusiasts, and folks within the cider trade from around the world.

We’re gonna be getting to our featured presentation with John Bunker and Todd Little-Seibold coming right up, but first we’re gonna have a wee bit of news from out and about in Ciderville First up is some exciting news from Boston, Massachusetts. The Chronicle, the long-running, award-winning television news magazine on WCVB Channel 5 in Boston, has begun releasing what I expect might be a series of Instagram posts about cider.

Now, for those of you outside of New England, [00:02:00] Chronicle has been telling stories about people, places, food, and culture of this region for more than 40 years. So having them turn their cameras towards cider is a pretty big deal. And the first Instagram features yours truly talking about three things most people don’t know about apples.

I reposted it to Instagram @ciderchatciderville, and I’d love for you to check it out and give it a heart. And here’s why I’m asking. It’s not just about supporting Cider Chat. It’s about showing major media outlets that there is an enthusiastic audience for cider stories. And when they see people engaging, sharing, commenting, perhaps they’ll think, “Hey, cider is worth covering.

Let’s do more of these stories.” And that’s good for all of us in Ciderville. So give that reel some love. And I recommend keeping your eye on the Instagram feed @ciderchatciderville because that’s where [00:03:00] we’ll be posting when the actual show, a full-length show all on cider, will be rolling out. And I really have no idea what they’re gonna be covering, so I’m just as curious as you are and excited for this opportunity to continue to see cider going up.

Cider does deserve its own newsroom, and that’s why at Cider Chat, we have what we call eCiderNews. Last Thursday was a published look at new consumer research out of Pennsylvania asking the question that matters to everyone who loves cider, and that is, “Who is drinking it? Who’s drinking cider?” Now, the research gives us a closer look at today’s cider buyers, including how drinking habits vary across age groups.

And I think those findings are worth paying attention to, whether you’re making cider, selling it, or simply enjoying it. And then we travel, at least virtually, to the Netherlands. There’s a new cider museum called [00:04:00] Cider in Zicht, and that translates roughly to Cider in Sight. It’s a wonderful story about Marcel Janssen, the founder of De Genener, that is a cidery in the Netherlands, and his efforts to build a place where people can discover cider’s history, culture, and traditions.

And what’s especially exciting is that this is being described as the first cider museum in the Netherlands. And we’re gonna be hearing more about it because I’m gonna be recording Uh, very shortly with Marcel about his cidery. He has been a longtime supporter of Cider Chat, and I have tried his products and have been absolutely wowed.

Just love what he’s doing, and I think it’s really time for everybody out there in Ciderville to know the story and to keep your eye on the Netherlands and to get yourself to De Hannenek. We’ll be talking all about that, so stay tuned to Cider Chat. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss that episode.

Now, a little heads-up [00:05:00] about eCiderNews. As I’m recording this, we’ve had a glitch at the website specific to eCiderNews, and some of the article links may not be working properly by the time you hear this episode, and there’s a reason. It’s because our wonderful web technician hasn’t been able to jump right on it.

She’s been working at the voting polls, and for those of you listening sometime in the future, this episode is be- being released on November 4th, 2026, and yesterday, November 3rd, was Election Day here in the United States, our midterm elections. So as it should be, civic duty took priority. But here’s how you can make sure that you don’t miss these stories.

Subscribe to the free weekly eCiderNewsletter. Every week, we’re bringing together links to our latest articles, along with cider news we’re watching from around the world. It also includes upcoming events and other happenings across Ciderville. That way, even if you miss something during the week, you could catch up in one [00:06:00] place, and you could find eCiderNews through ciderchat.com And speaking of events, I’d like to remind you out there in Ciderville that I’m gonna be at Cider Feast Boston on Saturday, November 14th.

I’ll be getting out among the cider drinkers with a glass in one hand and the recorder in the other, and you know what I’m doing. I’m gonna be getting outtakes from you at the actual event, sharing some of your thoughts. And don’t worry, I have a little fun card. You could read off of it and just kinda, like, finish the sentence or tell us a story about cider.

So if you heard this on Cider Chat, do let me know, and I see you on Saturday, November 14th at Cider Feast Boston. Yeah, there’s a lot of stories out in Ciderville, isn’t there? And most recently, on the past two episodes, I have featured stories from the UK. We had first Dennis Gwatkin of Gwatkin Cider Mill.

That’s right on the border of Wales [00:07:00] up in Herefordshire. Just an incredible place. There’s a restaurant, a place to camp. He really delivered. Uh, just a absolutely delightful man and some of the best food around. So if you’re headed to that area, check it out or maybe come t- with me on a Totally Cider tour.

I’ll talk about that in a minute. And then most recently, episode 519 featured Charles Martell. Now, Charles, whew, he has done so much, and it’s not just about cider and perry, but also he has helped preserve agricultural heritage. He helped rescue rare perry pear varieties and the Gloucester cattle. This is a breed that he uses to make his cheese, and in the conversation with him, you will hear how the milk is different than what we would know as a Jersey cow, the brown cows, which is super, super rich.

It’s a lighter milk, and that’s what he’s working with and making some very, very specific [00:08:00] regional cheeses. I was so fascinated by this guy and also amazing spirits. He doesn’t sell his perry or cider. He distills it into some magnificent drinks. So do check that out. And if you want to explore more of the UK and you’re thinking, “You know, geez, I’d really like to go there,” and I highly recommend that you do Perhaps you’ll be able to join me next August on a Totally Cider tour to the UK.

One of the joys of those tours is getting behind the bottle and meeting the people who make the cider. You know, we get to walk in the orchards, hear their stories, and just really understand the landscapes that shape what the people produce and their culture. And if you’re wondering what a Totally Cider is really like, there’s plenty of episodes in the Cider Chat archives featuring makers that we have already visited, along with recaps from previous tours.

Those episodes will give you a pretty good idea of the people and the [00:09:00] experiences that make these trips so special. And here’s something that I’ve learned from my years of traveling to cider regions. When you go out to plan a tour, I actually drink very little cider And if you’re thinking, “Hmm, why? Why, why is that, Ria?”

Well, it’s because of one primary reason: I’m the one driving, and you need a vehicle to get out into the countryside to reach those orchards and cideries that aren’t necessarily near a train station or a town center. And when you’re doing that on your own, somebody has to be the designated driver, and that’s one of the wonderful advantages of joining a Totally Cider tour.

You don’t have to worry about driving. You get to enjoy the tastings, meet the makers, and just take it all in and let somebody else handle the transportation and all the logistics. And of course, I get to enjoy the cider with you. There’s also gonna be a France in Blossom Time in April 2027. [00:10:00] That’s just, oh, another, another amazing adventure coming up.

So if you are either interested in the UK or France or just Totally Cider tours in general, do send an email this way to info@ciderchat.com. We’ll get you onto eCiderNews, where there’s always a release of the tour info, and get you on the list for any and all of those tours today. There’s no obligation.

It’s a simple way to stay in the loop and get first dibs when the details are ready. Dang, I know that was a lot of information, but, you know, you don’t have to worry because all of it is in the show notes for this here episode at ciderchat.com. Just look up episode 520, and you will find it. Uh, yeah, it’s a lot.

I know it’s a lot for me to say, too. But I wanna head to the featured presentation, and I have two things to tell you. One, this was videotaped. So I was on site, and I videotaped it with [00:11:00] my, my old-fashioned camcorder, and I think it came out pretty good. And so that is already gonna be up at the YouTube channel.

If you are a patron of Cider Chat, you’ll be able to check it out. Patrons always get first dib on the video, and that is just exclusively the presentation with Jon and Todd. And for those of you listening now, you’re gonna hear the presentation, too. Do know that there was a slideshow in the background, and, uh, you just kinda have to imagine the slides that they are looking at.

The entire talk took place at what is called the Heirloom Apple Day, and this is held at Scott’s Farm, which is in Vermont. It’s just a little outside of Brattleboro, Vermont, and Brattleboro is on the southern end of Vermont, right over the border from Massachusetts, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful farm.

They have a lot going on there, and they do this annual event. I think this is the second one I’ve attended, but it’s actually [00:12:00] their 23rd Heirloom Apple Day. This presentation is gonna roll right into both Todd and Jon doing their presentation. But what you’re missing from the actual videotape is the orchardist there.

Her name is Erin Robertson at Scott Farm, and she introduced John and Todd, and she also brought in all the folks who work on the farm, the actual farm workers themself. And that is always, for me, that’s a real big honor to really thank these people who are doing the really heavy lifting at the farm. And if you wanna see a photo of them, a still photo, you go to the Cider Chat Facebook page because that’s gonna be the cover photo this week announcing this episode.

And while you’re there, give that photo a little bit of love because the farm workers themselves wanted to listen to the presentation, but they couldn’t. They had to do work. So they will know how many people were loving them up from the distance, [00:13:00] even if it’s just a photo. It, the word gets back to them, and that’s what it’s all about here in the world of cider.

We help each other lift up and keep on going on, and that helps keep cider going up. So now, without further ado, we’re gonna head to the 23rd Annual Heirloom Apple Day at Scott Farm, located in Dummerston, Vermont, with the presenters, John Bunker and Todd Little-Siebold, bringing us into their presentation on apples and apple trees

welcome everybody. This was a daunting challenge to decide what you all might want to hear about because we work on a number of very exciting, interesting projects. But John and I have been working together for many years now, and have had l- the opportunity to work on the reconstruction of the pedigree of American apples through DNA, and in general, that is fascinating to people.

So we’re [00:14:00] gonna talk a little bit about that. John’s gonna do an overview about tracking down, finding and preserving old apple trees. He will also just talk briefly about the biology of apples and why that matters. I’ll circle back to that. Then I’m gonna go through what we’ve learned about the pedigree of early American apples.

It’s really wonderful to be here because I can just hold up the apple- … because Erin grows them. So without further ado, Dr. John. Okay.

I feel like I should sing a song. Thank you, Todd. Thank you, Erin, especially, and everybody else here at Scott Farm. Thank you all for coming.

Often people ask me how I got into this and why I do this. And for a long time I did it pretty much alone. And I thought a lot about why I [00:15:00] did it, and when people asked me how I got into it, I realized I could come up with a different reason every time. So finally I decided that those things really didn’t matter.

What mattered was what I was observing and what I was learning. I also came to the conclusion that I shouldn’t come to conclusions. And that really what this was about deep observation of what is. And I love doing this through apples because the apple trees are really wonderful teachers.

And they teach us about where we were, [00:16:00] where we are now, and where we might be in the future And they teach us about two words in particular that I really think a lot about. One is place, and the other is mobility. And I’m gonna talk about, in a second I’ll talk about who we are, who we were, and what we might be in the future.

But I wanna talk about place and mobility first. Um, obviously they’re trees. And they are in a place. And and we are all in a place too, even if some of us have been in a place for multiple generations. I’ve been fortunate to live on the same farm for now almost fifty-five years, so I’m [00:17:00] climbing in trees that I planted.

The apple trees also teach us about mobility because an apple from a seed or the seed of an apple can move very easily from place to place, and have in fact, as many of you know, moved all the way around the world. So the trees teach us about both the mobility of the seed and the beauty of finding a place, and then putting down roots, and then staying there

so apples are really very similar to us in some basic ways. One is this thing about mobility and place. Another is that as you either know or [00:18:00] I hope you’ll know soon, from a seed every apple is unique. It is fifty percent a mom and fifty percent a dad, and the mom and the dad can’t be the same, just like with us.

So in that sense, apples from seed are exactly like everyone in this room, unless you are an identical twin, and apples don’t do identical twins. They can even have the same mom and dad, but they’re still unique individuals, just like us. This is what we call a diploid.

We’re all diploids and apples from seed are all diploids The reason why we have, and I’m not gonna delve into this too deeply, but the reason why we have a row of hidden [00:19:00] rows and a row of Lamb Abbey, Pearmain, and so forth is because of grafting. That’s cloning. We don’t yet clone human beings. I hope we never do, but maybe we will someday.

But so far, we don’t do that. So apples from seed, every seed is unique. . Each of us is like an apple from a seed. And We are the seedlings of seedlings of seedlings of seedlings. We’re gonna get into the DNA and the genetics.

Todd’s gonna talk more about it. But the ancestry of us goes back You know, 23andMe, whatever. The same is true with the apples. Their genetics go back generation, generation, generation, generation So [00:20:00] we don’t have a lot of time for this talk, so I’m not gonna go into that too deeply. But where are we now?

Right now, we have seedling apples, apples from seed, unique individuals, just like all of us in the room, spread all over the northern part of the US and Canada. Millions of apples from seed, apple trees from seed. These, every one is a unique individual. They spread by bears, by deer, by raccoons, by people tossing cores out the window of their cars, and they have naturalized everywhere.

By, and when I say the millions, I’m not exaggerating. There are probably more seedling apples out there across North America than there are grafted trees in orchards or backyards, [00:21:00] including hopefully some of yours So we followed that model pretty well. We migrated around the world. Many of us have our roots in Europe or Asia or whatever.

We got to the US or Canada, someplace in North America, and we put down roots, and then something happened. And something happened, I don’t know, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, when this notion of place, this notion of being a tree, of finding a place, putting down roots, and staying there and seeing what happened, died.

Not completely, but we became a mobile society. One where if you’re blue collar, if you’re [00:22:00] white collar, if you’re educated, if you’re less educated, if you’re rich, if you’re poor, it was like mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile. No home, no roots, no tree Is that good? Is that bad? Whatever. It’s a observation. We avoid the conclusion.

We just make the observation and see what we think

So what can we do?

If we use the apple tree as the model, we say, “Okay, let’s, let’s dabble with this notion of finding a place. Let’s dabble with the notion of, uh, as the beat poet said, Gary Snyder, ‘Don’t move.’ Whether you live in the city or the country or somewhere in between, [00:23:00] can we contemplate that?”

When we stay in one place, we can practice deep observation I live in a spot, I’ve been there 55 years, and I can plant a tree and watch it. I can have a garden and do the garden year after year after year after year, and it repeats itself in a circle. I like to think of it in that, in that wonderful kids game that mostly young girls play, double Dutch, um, jump rope, where you have two ropes going, and you stand on the side, and then at a certain point, you get in, and that’s like the year.

It’s like the tide. It comes in, it goes out, it comes in, it goes out. It’s the breath. It’s all that. And that is what the trees are about. That’s what the [00:24:00] old trees are about. So Just about a week ago, I went to a old estate on the coast of Maine. I went with my intern, the two of us went, and the tree was 200 years old.

And the trunks, it has multiple trunks. They had laid down on the ground. They were rotten, but they were still intact. And then up from the ground had come multiple other trunks. The entire tree is only about 15 feet tall, barely taller than this ceiling, but it’s 75 feet across and nearly 250 feet around.

And it loops and turns and goes back into the ground and comes out again. This tree has been through everything. It has seen the [00:25:00] worst hurricanes, the worst freezes, the worst pests. This is where the future is. These cultivars are so wonderful, but they’re all gonna be gone someday That’s kind of hard for me to say as somebody that has attempted for all of my life to be preserving them, but what we really want is we want the genetics in there.

So we say, why do we do this? Why do we save these old trees? Well, partly we save them because they are the future, just like we, you know, in the genes of us, are the future So when we see these old trees, they are the observers. They are the ones that have stood the test of time.

This one called [00:26:00] Lady. Mm-hmm. Is it, they think this, this cultivar as we say, as a pomologist says, variety you might say, 2,000 years old. Not this tree, but this cultivar

So The trees, the apple trees are by the side of the road from seed. They grow in the, we say the puckerbrush. They have other things grow, blackberries, and maybe darn poison ivy, or it’s all growing in a community. They teach us about community. The apple trees teach us about community. They teach us about longevity.

The most beautiful trees I see are these ones that are, you know, like me, broken down, hollow, falling apart. , The young ones are beautiful too, but the old ones, they’re incredible They teach [00:27:00] us about trade because they’re trading off. We’re now learning scientists are doing these studies with the roots and how the roots are going back and forth, and the different species of plants are trading information and all this stuff.

They’re not about money. They’re about trade. That’s what our communities used to be about. These were moneyless communities that thrived here. In my town in central Maine in 1840, there was more people there then than there were when I moved there 100 and whatever, 30 years later. And they picked a place.

They moved there. Many of them were refugees after the Revolution. They moved there. Like the seed, they put down roots, and they figured out how to make a living there in community To [00:28:00] me, in human institutions, we have the barn which makes me so happy when I see these old barns. They are almost the human equivalent of the old apple tree.

Some of you have heard of Dan Bussey. Dan is a good friend of mine, a good friend of Todd’s, and he spent about 40 years, and he’s still working on it, but he’s, was compiling classic historic descriptions of approximately 16,000 apples.

And if you’re into this, get his book. They’re, it’s seven volumes called The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada. It’s the most important book ever published on this side of the Atlantic about apples. [00:29:00] And he has this thing that he says, which I’m not gonna quote him exactly, he found it somewhere else, which is that those of us who can speak owe it to those of us who can’t or can no longer speak for themselves to tell their stories.

And the stories are the old apples. The old apples can take us right through the history really of the world, but they can also tell us about our town, because part of the beauty of the seedling, the seed, the apple seed, and each of us as a seedling, is that we are unique. Every town in New England had its own unique collection of old, of apple cultivars.

This was not one size fits all like today, where it’s, you know, Honey Crisp, [00:30:00] and Gala, and McIntosh, or whatever. This was like, you went to Dummerston and you got these apples. You went over to whatever, I don’t know Vermont so well, Manchester, and you got other apples, and so forth and so on. You came to Maine and you got other apples.

Like the cheeses in France, where you have different ones in different towns. This is the uniqueness of this whole process of starting as seed, using that metaphor, then finding roots, staying there, and having that become your place. That’s the root of community. That’s the root of all these old varieties.

, I used to think when I was first getting into it, I wouldn’t save them if I didn’t know the name. And so I tried to find names for them and, you know, o- we use old books and letters and, and ag reports and- journals and, I [00:31:00] mean, it’s incredible. It’s like Sherlock Holmes.

But then at a certain point I realized, oh, wait a minute, actually, the ones that I don’t know the names, those are the ones that are even more valuable because they have these mysterious stories, mysteries behind them that we need to, or we can… Do we need to? Some would agree, some would say yes, some would say no.

But we have this potential to track down the stories, learn the stories, and then we can save these old varieties, cultivars, in places like the Maine Heritage Orchard, which AErin referred to. Or there should be a Vermont Heritage Orchard with Stone and Bethel and Tinmouth and Scots Winter and so [00:32:00] forth, Bottle Greening, the Vermont apples and the apples that were traditionally grown here.

You know why? Because maybe it’s because they remind us of the beauty of place and the value of being in a spot where you can sit and observe and create community and watch, and not make conclusions. You know, I, I think that as soon as I begin to say, “Well, it used to be better,” or, “It used to be worse,” or, “It should be this way,” or, “It should be that way,” I’m just distracting myself from the observations that are possible by just being out there in the garden, in the orchard, in the woods, along the old stone walls, and just seeing what we see and seeing what [00:33:00] happens to us as we deeply observe wherever we are.

Okay, I’m gonna get it over to Todd.

Thanks, John. It’s always really exciting to follow John because it’s sort of from the sublime to the ridiculous. Sort of philosophical. But when I first met John about 20 years ago, um, he says that I started to stalk him. Because part of what I was really interested in w- is what he was doing how he was tracking down the apples that were lost in Maine.

He had a first book called Not Too Far From the Tree, which was a history of the apples in his town, and I immediately recognized John as a sort of fellow historian who was doing the work of tracking down old apples, but also more… maybe as importantly, as he was saying, tracking down the stories and the ways that people came to, to have these apples to preserve them, to propagate them.

And so, I started [00:34:00] to roam around, particularly eastern Maine, closest to the Canadian border, the last two counties. I always say, you know, he… John, I don’t know if he’s ever heard me say this, you know, John’s the marshal, I’m the deputy. I’m like, okay, I have two counties. I can only handle two counties ’cause John would drive up to Aroostook County, four hours away, and spend however many days just going and visiting people.

And he had managed to arrange his life um, that that wasn’t crazy, uh, it wasn’t impossible. Uh, I have a full-time job as a professor, but I immediately recognized this was something that would work well as an educational project. So when I began, I was like, “Oh, this could make a good class.” And it has.

Some of my students are here, raise your hands, students of College of the Atlantic who are- Yeah. So they are only doing a class on the history of apples, uh, this fall for 10 weeks 450 hours, so we’ll find out what they’re learning. Our first trip was to go, [00:35:00] uh, John graciously agreed to co-teach this class, so we drove to Geneva, New York, and the first day of class was in the USDA germplasm collection, um, so that they could see 6,000 apple trees.

Wow. Because if you start there, it can only go up. Because now you have all the questions. And this was one of the things, as a historian, I recognized immediately in John’s work, is the question , like, what happened? Where are these apples? Why, why can’t I get this apple in the supermarket?

And by the way, I’ll just say, you all are so lucky to have Scott Farms. Woo-hoo. You are so lucky to have- The vision and the stewardship of many generations, the Holbrooks, the Goodband, and now , somebody that I admire greatly. Erin is an unbelievable orchardist, but also a, a committed steward.

I often say this about both John and her, they make me tired. Like, I listen to what they do and I’m like, “Okay.” But what we do is basically lost and [00:36:00] found. It’s like trying to find the things that mattered to people historically and how to discover, recover their stories John will say often, “Sometimes you have a name and you’re looking for an apple, or sometimes you have an apple and you’re looking for a name.”

This one is called currently, a provisional name. It is called Oh Wow. This is from the island of North Haven, um, out off the coast of Maine. I’ve done a lot of work there trying to reconstruct the genetics, hopefully of offshore islands that are genetically isolated to see if we can detect early Basque and French and English apples.

But instead I found Oh Wow, which is now growing in the Heritage Orchard nursery and at my place. It’s a child of Blue Pearmain, which is here, and is a spectacular apple, and as John said, we, we, um, we’re, we’re a great complement for each other ’cause we think similarly, uh, but we [00:37:00] also disagree, in a friendly way.

And I was like, “I don’t care what this is called. It’s a wow. Like, oh my God, this is an amazing apple.” So we have hundreds of provisional names in the Heritage Orchard, 400 apples roughly in our collection at the Maine Heritage Orchard, and we find more every year, and I expect we’ll find more and more.

And MOFGA, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, has – recklessly agreed to allow us to continue to build that collection. It’s amazing. Really cool. And then, you know, sometimes you have a name and, and you’re trying to figure out… This is an apple from southern Maine called Northern Belle that we know is listed, and so we’re trying to find that.

Um, but what’s really fun to me about this is we, John and I together many years ago, we were talking and I was like, “We should do an apple conference.” And John was like, “Yeah, that, that would be nice, Todd. What if we did something called Maine Apple Camp, and people came to a camp [00:38:00] in Maine and spent the weekend just talking about apples together?”

And I was like, “Yeah, that’s a better idea.” So the very first year Thomas Chow from the USDA came. We met him. John met him. John went to there and began to have the idea of having what they call, what scientists call apple enthusiasts- … meet with scientists. And so John set about with Gail Volk from the USDA and Thomas to have that meeting.

And at that meeting we met a, a friend of ours now, very close friend of ours, Cameron Peace from Washington State University, who is an apple geneticist. And like John Cameron loves kind of riddles And he says, “Okay, how many generations do you think there are between the oldest cultivars and the newest cultivars?”

And the idea is actually that the history of apples is quite compressed. It’s several generations, and things are very closely related to one another, even though there were, in North America, 20 to [00:39:00] 22,000 named varieties, maybe more. And those are the named ones that are recorded, but there are hundreds, thousands more that are just locally grown.

So we got to know Cameron, and , he talked about this, and John and I immediately like, “Oh, we should get to know this guy.” And he decided we were gonna be the guinea pigs for his new genetic testing, one of the collaborators that would be the guinea pigs for how, uh, sort of crowdsourced DNA testing could help them reconstruct the a- the family tree of old American apples.

And how this works is first off, so you try to figure out if it’s a seedling or a grafted tree. You take a few leaves off of a, a branch. You put it in a tube. You send it off to Washington State. They send it off to a, a service that does the DNA extraction, and it compares it to a database of about 6,000 international varieties.

So it’s like, “Yep, you’ve got Macintosh. Yes, you have this, you have that,” or, “No.” And [00:40:00] no means it’s a unique unknown. That’s the term that they use for this. So we have about 130, 180 unique unknowns in the main heritage orchard, so roughly half of the collection, nobody knows what they are. We cannot match it to another cultivar.

And what became very clear very early on is our success depended on the success of other people. Other people had to find the same apple, so we knew it was a cultivar, and so that we would begin to be able to say, “Okay let’s dial this in.” And in the process, we also learned something that is extremely interesting and has become my personal obsession, is basically every early American apple, every single one has French ancestors, parents or grandparents that are French apples, and so far, virtually no English ancestors Okay?

So a historian runs across this, it’s like, okay, what in God’s [00:41:00] green earth could this mean? So this is why I began to do testing on offshore islands. I was, can we find the genetic traces offshore? Where could this be happening and how could it be happening?

. I call them the grand-mere, the grandmothers, of all early American apples, every single one. Reinette franche, Drap d’Or, Reinette d’ Hollande, Reinette de Carmes, and Calville Rouge. These are like the super grandmothers, and they’re all French. So this really gets you to begin thinking. , The people who discovered this, Murante et al published a, a major paper on this.

All the data is there, 2020. Um, and it shows all of the networked relationships of all of these apples that they’ve tested so far to les grand-mere, to the grandmothers. And you can sort of see that there are these bright dots in the middle that are these founders. For example, Reinette franche, which is one of the really [00:42:00] important ones, it’s right here.

Reinette de Carmes Drap d’Or, Drap d’Or. One of my students, Eva Celi, is trying to teach me how to pronounce it in French. I keep working on this. So, um, so this is fascinating. A, like, big puzzle. Very, very big puzzle. And they also, Nick Howard, one of our collaborators, which show, did the reconstruction of the University of Minnesota’s pedigree, and Reinette franche is right at the top.

You know, it’s just right up here. And now, of course, th- this could be for anything, but what this shows you is the network of relationships that are the human relationships, as John was saying, between their mobility and fixity, as people came and they said, “Whoa, that’s a good apple. Let’s give it a name,” or, “Let’s use this.”

But what I love about it is it means that these four French, five French apples were in orchards crossing all the time, and then people were taking those apples or taking those seeds and either bringing the trees, grafted trees. [00:43:00] So this is, like, s- fascinating to me, and I was like, “I, I can an- I can start to answer some of these questions.”

So just to give you an idea, some of the Franco-American apples, Golden Russet, Roxbury Russet, Esopus Spitzenburg, Pumpkin Sweet, Twenty Ounce, Fameuse Hunt Russet, the list goes on and on. And in fact, Hunt Russet, John and I currently have a puzzle, is both of the parents… So Hunt Russet is a very old, reputed to be an o- very, very old Massachusetts apple from around Concord, but both parents are French.

So I was like, “John, French apple.” It’s not Hunt Russet. It’s a French apple. And so can we find evidence that would help us answer this one way or another? So this was a question I did not have. Like, what the heck? Well, these French apples, where were they in British North America that would have led to this?

And this begins to fuel all kinds of research questions, hypotheses, and ways that we could approach this. We’ve raised lots of [00:44:00] money not enough, but lots of money to try to do systematic testing so that we can begin to answer these questions. It also leads to rethinking the history of American fruit trees, because this is an apple tree from an Iroquois orchard, Haudenosaunee orchard in Geneva, New York that when S.A.

Beach wrote his famous Apples of New York, he puts this picture in of him standing next to the, this Native American tree that at that point in 1900 is, like, close to two hundred years, right? So the indigenous orchards are really not something people think very much about. One quick thing to say that maybe not everybody knows, there are only wild crab apples in North America, in the East, Malus coronaria, and Malus angustifolia in the South, then Malus ioensis in the upper Midwest, and then Ma-Malus fusca in the Northwest.

So there were no sort of domesticated apples at all. [00:45:00] And you may know this, I’m a professor, so I can’t help myself. Malus domestica, these apples, all of these apples are Malus domestica, and they are an interspecific hybrid. They are a, a hybrid of four species from Central Asia Iran and Turkey and Bulgaria and Western Europe.

So all– Humans have to move all three, and then a little bit of Malus prunata from up, up in in Siberia, China, Manchuria. So humans make this apple. They create it by moving these apples together. Just as all of these cultivars are made by people putting apples together, those species had to be put together over time.

So my focus has been on the earliest history of American apples. I’m writing a book, and one of the things I say is I’m trying to write my way out of the 17th century, because everything happens in the 16th and 17th century that matters in terms of these things. [00:46:00] So John and I were having a discussion, it could be called a, a dispute, about whether people brought grafted tr- or trees early and how many.

And then people will say, you know, “Folks planted everything from seed.” And I was like, “John, how do we know that?” So I started to say what can I find out about the earliest introductions of seeds and grafted trees to see what empirically could be said. So the first apple, record of an apple is Verrazzano sailing across the southern coast of New England in 1524, and he said, “Today we saw the apie apple.”

So he lands and he sees what is w- probably one of the most popular apples in France at the time, and we could say, “Well, maybe he was seeing a native crab apple.” Maybe, or maybe he knew what the hell he was looking at, right? So the earliest record is [00:47:00] 1524. So it means that apples, whether it’s a, you know, somebody throws a app- a piece apple overboard and it c- seedling or whatever, but the earliest credible record of a European apple, and that means that apple were thrown overboard or whatever by the earliest, earliest French and Basque fishermen probably who were coming to the northern coast of North America in 1500, fif- 1498, 1500.

The earliest orchard, 1604, in the St. Croix R- River in Maine. During Champlain’s voyage they plant an orchard and then they move to Port Royal, 1608. Earliest recorded European orchard of apples, 1604 Earliest plantings, we don’t really, other than this orchard maybe, like in Maine there’s some, some apples that are planted.

They say they plant fruit trees very close to where where we found this 200-year-old tree. Earliest shipment of [00:48:00] apple trees, 1631, brought in on the ship The Lion to Boston, grafted trees from England. I discovered a nursery book from 1648 that listed every variety that this man was grafting and selling around Hartford, Connecticut.

So you, you begin to have a really detailed view of what people were doing, what was happening. And this is the list: Tankard, Holland Pippin, London Pippin, Summer Pearmain, English Codling. And part of this was to figure out why the English ancestors are missing. Here they were. They were in the ground in Hartford, Connecticut in 1648.

So we were working away on this and at the time, the Drap d’Or was referred to as Unknown Founder 13, ’cause they didn’t know what it was yet. So we’re doing a bunch of testing, and Cameron writes back to us in 2023. He says , “Okay, you found Baldwin, you found McIntosh, you [00:49:00] found, 20 ounce.”

And then he says, “Oh, wow, you found Unknown Founder 13.” So we found a tree in Verona, Bucksport, Maine, that is the old, one of these old founding apples, Drap d’Or de, de Bretagne. It’s the most unremarkable tree, and it may be one of the oldest continuously propagated trees in America. Um, they also have other unknown founders, Unknown Founder 7, which now has the glorious name of Pointy Pineapple-

which some friends of ours found in Somerset. John and I went over looking to, to figure out why these ancestors were missing So you can see already that this, this partnership with John’s sort of intention of make, of saving and preserving these old cultivars the research that it takes, and then how together we crowdsource these answers because one of the things, we’ll find an apple in Maine, and then it just starts popping up over, all over the place.

We have one [00:50:00] called Sorrento that now we’ve found in New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado, Washington State, Idaho. So this begins to tell us it’s a significant cultivar, whereas others are really the only one. The ones in the Maine Heritage Orchard, many of these trees, the old tree’s dead, and we have two.

So the sort of arc, you know, the arc of what you, what you try to save. But what’s really fun about this is that Api, which is this old French apple that Verrazzano found, is the parent of Fameuse, which is the old Snow Apple from Canada, which is the parent of McIntosh, right? And so we begin to see the relationships, and actually, it turns out when you bite, when you eat all of those together, like, mm, that tracks.

Got it. So, um, and what’s really delightful about it is we know, in some ways we know what we’re looking for, but we are also just searching for all of these connections. So John’s gonna talk a little bit about some of the surprises and challenges as we’ve [00:51:00] worked on this because they’re endless. We have…

I mean, the list of mysteries that we’re trying to solve is as longer than our arm. I mean, it’s just terrible at some level, but exciting at the same time. So we’re gonna talk about a few, and, and every place has these, and John’s gonna talk about a couple that are examples, and then we’ll see if you have questions.

This is an apple called Newtown Pippin, which originated in, uh, Long Island, and it was a very famous historic apple grown widely including all the way into California, where it’s still being grown commercially. They thought was Newtown Pippin here, and, uh, some, some, uh, enthusiasts saw it and said, um, “This is not Newtown Pippin”, but they didn’t know what it was.

And so, uh, I don’t know whether we DNA profiled it or not. That’s w- what we call it when we do the [00:52:00] DNA. But, uh, two years ago, I took fruit from the tree here home with me. And to give you an idea of the, uh… So Todd was talking about how the DNA is done with a, you, you compare it to what is called a reference panel.

Well, if it’s not in the reference panel, as Todd said, it comes back unique. That either means it’s from seed, which is therefore always unique, you now know, or it’s a rare cultivar that just hasn’t gotten into the reference panel yet, so they don’t have anything to compare it to. So when that is the case, what I do is I, I have a key, a searchable key that I’ve created, and then I have these books, like Apples of New York that Todd referred to, or Dan Bussey’s book, The Illustrated History, and so forth.

And I’ll, like, sit down at the dining room [00:53:00] table with, I like to use about 20 apples, because if I just use one, it might be maybe the stem is short, but is the stem typically long? Or maybe what we call the cavity, which is this part, maybe it’s a little bit shallow, but typically it’s deep or whatever. So I like to have a whole bunch of them.

I lay them out on the table and start describing them, cutting them up, and trying to figure out what I have. Well, it turned out- that, uh, that what they had here at Scott Farm was an apple called Peck’s Pleasant, which, uh, I think is from Rhode Island. I can’t remember now, but I’m pretty sure that’s correct.

And it’s a wonderful heirloom, uh, mostly cooking apple that looks very much like Newtown Pippin. So I contacted Erin and said, “Okay, I think what we have is Peck’s [00:54:00] Pleasant.” I can’t remember, I s- and I can’t remember, I should rem- I should have done my homework here. I can’t remember whether we DNA profiled it, but we’re just about positive that it’s Peck’s Pleasant.

So then a few weeks later, I’m reading this book from, you know, 1830 or something, and I’m reading along. It says, “Newtown Pippin and Peck’s Pleasant are typically confused with one another”. And I thought, “Oh, wow, that is so awesome”. So, uh, there’s all these, we call it phenotyping when you do it by the characteristics of the apple.

All the great apple writers, pomologists of the past, they all made mistakes. There are many apples around the US that have multiple synonyms that are accepted true names of those apples in that state or even that county. But, but in another state or another county, [00:55:00] they’re called something else.

There are some that are absolutely just flat out errors. One that some of you know about if you’re into cider was, is called Foxwhelp, which is probably the most historically famous English cider apple. It got over here, and people were thinking, “This is not a cider apple. This is like a, sort of a mediocre cooking apple”.

It’s sort of big and nondescript, and, and so, so they started calling it Fowhelp. And, uh, and so, uh, when, when Todd and I went to England, uh, oh, 15, 20 years ago, we met with a, with a cider apple historian and, and said, “Okay, we want to import some apples from England”. And I, and, and so one of the, uh, intern- [00:56:00] my intern was with me, and she said, “Get Foxwhelp.”

So, so we got Foxwhelp. We took, we got the scion wood, the cuttings- Move them through the USDA has a program of, uh, called, uh, APHIS, where you can import plant material from around the world. Eventually, we had it, we got it released, we got it DNA profiled. It is correct, and now we actually have this true Foxwhelp here in the US.

This is sort of the kind of thing that we do. But what we wanna do now is get, like, a few questions. Who, who has a question? Ja

Yeah. So the question is, what, what do you do if you want to submit leaves? You can contact Scott Farm and they’ll put you in touch with us if… But there’s also, um, a website called [00:57:00] My Fruit Tree, myfruittree.org, and that is Cameron Peace who Todd was talking about, and they have a whole program where you can submit leaves, uh, and have them DNA profiled.

Other questions? Ja

Yep. Basically every kind. Where did the English apples, like in England come from? Were they also like- Yeah. Yeah, yeah Yeah, Todd, Todd can maybe answer that. Yeah,

this is very, unsettling to the English. And the people in New England, right? ‘Cause they have this sort of Anglo-centric thing, right, going on. In Maine, we’re New France, right? In fact, here in Vermont, you were New France. Well, actually, you were actually Wabanaki or Abenaki, so, but, um, that history is just forgotten when people come here, that, [00:58:00] “Oh, there were people here.”

And in the upper Midwest, I mean, when the Americans… You know, Johnny’s Appleseed shows up. Jesus Christ, people have been growing apples there for 200 years. It’s like, “Oh, the Americans are here. Now there are gonna be apples.” Like, crazy. So, um, what, what’s missing, what’s interesting is the English, under Henry VIII, started to import French apples to improve English apples And they brought them into Kent.

And so what’s interesting about this, it means that in every case, when Hunt Russet comes to be, there is Reinette de Carmé and Reinette franche are in the same orchard together, right? So every time you see the parentage, you know they were in an orchard together, or at least in a place where there’s growing.

So these were grown widely, widely in France, widely in parts of England, and they become this sort of super, like, stock. So it happens in England, and it also may have happened here. Like Esopus Spitzenberg, this is in the Dutch Hudson area, um, so it could be that those [00:59:00] trees were brought. We have a friend, Michael Clifford, who works in New Jersey and Connecticut.

He found a Reinette de Carmé apple that’s twelve and a half feet in circumference. So people are planting them. They’re bringing them here. One of the interesting things is they didn’t come in that list from Hartford, Connecticut. You know, we don’t see that. But actually, interestingly this is actually a French apple that is called Belly Bond in English. Uh, but it’s been here. It’s been here for a long damn time. So th- And the question is, can we find re-records that show us where that happened and when that happened? But the DNA will tell us, right? And one of the things with this unknown founder with d’Or is we kept finding kids of it in Maine, and it was like, “God, it’s, it has to have been here.”

And lo and behold, probably in Castine, the town of Castine is the oldest French settlement in Maine, and they were there continuously from the sixteen fifties or so. So it’s probably planted there and just spread, spread out. And we [01:00:00] know that people locally took apples from, quote-unquote, “The French orchards.”

And that happens all through the Up-Upper Midwest and Red Detroit. There are many, many French apples. One thing about this  Drap d’Or. is that in that part where we found this, we’ve now found two more of the same apple. Um, and, and one of them was called the Old Main Greening, so the, the actual name of  Drap d’Or. had been lost and this and the old-timer, one of our colleagues, found the tree and thought, “You know, this is very old.”

It had been grafted from an old tree into this old-timer’s orchard, and so our friend Pete said to him, um, “So we could DNA profile this and tell you what it really is.” And the fellow looked at Pete and said, “It’s the Old Main Greening.” Um, but a couple other things a- about that. One is about the, the [01:01:00] diversity of apples in North America.

There was a huge infusion of Russian apples around 1815, and the primary original ones were Duchess of Oldenburg, Alexander Tatovsky, and Red Astrakhan. Later, about another 150 Russian apples were brought here. This was all as a way of making, uh, apples heartier for northern areas. So, those were not French apples.

Those genetics now are, are well established throughout, uh, North America. And, um, and the apple as it is now in North America is considered to be, um, one of the most important centers of diversity of the apple in the world because of not just the French, [01:02:00] but also the Russian and so, and then all over Europe eventually, apples were being brought over here.

Todd was talking about the apples being brought to, from France into England. Now we’ve been doing a lot of work with cider apples from England with English names, and they’re being DNA profiled and coming out as synonyms of French cider apples. So many times the apples were brought from country one to country two, whatever it was, and just renamed out of convenience.

I mean, the most important pear in the world is Bartlett, and where it originated, it’s not called Bartlett.

The earliest orchards in the New World are in Mexico planted by the Spanish, right? Which again, the Anglo-centric view is like, “Oh, did something happen here before we got here?”[01:03:00]

So earliest orchards, 1520 or so, but the earliest apples likely were along the fishing stations all along the New England coast up through Newfoundland. And their Spanish apples are very different from many other parts of Europe, so they should be detectable, but we have not found them yet.

Which unfortunately is part of what you find out when you, uh, launch off on a, uh, on a hypothesis. It’s like, “Well, maybe this is true.” It’s like, not yet. The techniques for, for deter- detecting very old ancestors are actually weak, so that what we do does well for parents and grandparents, but not deeper time.

And one of the earliest apples we didn’t talk about today in, in Eastern North America, in Massachusetts, is called Orange Sweeting, and they get it from the local native people, from the Natick, uh, Wampanoag.

Right? So yeah, I think, I think it’s improbable that they did not have that, and where we have [01:04:00] records, we see this again and again. Okay. Well, thank you all very much for joining us this morning. Thank you.

Tip of the glass to John Bunker and Todd Little-Seibold for sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm, and also to Scott Farm for bringing everyone together for the 23rd Annual Heirloom Apple Day. An old apple tree is a living connection to the people and the places and the history that came before all of us.

Yeah. You’re gonna find the links and all the information discussed in this episode by going to the show notes for episode 520 at ciderchat.com. And if you’re enjoying Cider Chat and wanna help keep these stories coming, please do become a patron over at the site called Patreon. Or if a one-time contribution is more your style, simply hit the donate button at [01:05:00] ciderchat.com.

Every bit of support helps keep Cider Chat rolling and these conversations flowing. And with that, I leave you here. This is Ria Windcaller, signing off for now. Looking forward to seeing you in Ciderville. We like orchards. There is a reason why we do it like this. And having fun is the

reason. There is a reason why we do it like this. We like cider. We like pumps. There is a reason why we do it like this. We like orchards. There is a reason why we do it like this. And having fun. Yee-haw!