January, 1998

After Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), native of Concord, Massachusetts, graduated in the humanities from Harvard in 1837, his interest turned to exploring the wilds, researching, lecturing, and writing. To supplement his income, he sometimes took up his father's familiar trade of pencilmaking. He also grafted fruit trees, built boats, and did odd jobs. In 1841, he was briefly jailed for withholding taxes in protest against slavery. Yearning for "the simple life" and closeness to nature, he built a cabin in the woods near Concord in 1845, and lived there frugally and alone for over two years. There, his interest in wild edibles - especially apples - awoke. Only in 1851, after his bad teeth had been replaced with dentures, could he fully relish wild fruits!

The literary mentors Thoreau found among Harvard's then over 80,000 library books are many, but three in particular stand out:

ùNature (1835), a collection of essays by his philosopher friend Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), dealing with the relationship of the soul to nature.

ùNorth American Sylva (1819), a three-volume work on American forest plants by Francois Andre Michaux.

ùReport on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (1846) by George Barrell Emerson (no relation to Waldo), a Harvard botanist and educator. This exacting two-volume work is enhanced by a fascination which beckoned Thoreau. "A point with which I have each year [i.e., since 1835] been more and more struck, is the beauty of our native trees..." writes Emerson in his foreword.

Thoreau's findings and musings on fruit are found in hundreds of manuscript pages entitled Notes on Fruits or Wild Fruits. He became more interested in fruit as he grew older, gathering knowledge by constant examination of the Malus population in neighboring pastures and forests. For him, the miracle of fruit development is as much a scientific one, challenging the rational mind, as a practical one, filling the senses with delight. In the early months of 1860, Thoreau lectured on wild apples in the towns of Concord and Bedford. On April 2, 1852, one month before his death of tuberculosis at the age of 44, he fulfilled a promise to his friend, the editor J. T. Fields. He submitted the manuscript Wild Apples, his lecture series, to be published in Atlantic Monthlv already then a prestigious periodical.

A quote on the curriculum of apple seedlings in the wild will give you a taste:

"The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy; for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph. Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes .

...By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen...I make haste to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more memorable varieties than both of them." (pp. 28, 30)

At the time when Thoreau explored the Concord countryside for wild apples, well over a thousand apple cultivars had been documented in the United States. In Massachusetts alone, then a hub of fruit interest, grower manuals with descriptive cultivar lists had been published by Thacher (1822), Fessenden (1828), Kenrick (1832), Manning (1838), Yves (1840), Cole (1849), Jaques (1849), Hovey (1852-1856). Following their advocacy, new, easy-eating cultivars were planted extensively. To Thoreau, the one-of-a-kind apples of the seedling orchards had provided adventures in tasting and had given the New England cider its hearty attraction. He commented elsewhere that the temperance movement must have welcomed all these tame, grafted cultivars that made insipid cider.

Apples - more than people - are the result of a sexual gamble by carrying genes of several species and mating without choice of partner. A marketable apple is like a genius among people, but, just as nice ordinary folk exist, there are what Thoreau calls his wild apples. He appreciates many of the 79,999 seedling apples out of 80,000 which, according to accepted odds, cannot achieve market status because, among other things, they are too small, too plain, too big, too tender, too tart, or too irregular in shape. Compared to Europe, little grafting was practiced in North America before Thoreau's time. The genetic diversity accumulated by North American seedlings soon outranked that of Europe. Many North American cultivars arising from this multitude are grown in Europe; few European cultivars are popular in North America.

Thoreau's wild apples range in size from a large cherry to over 3" in diameter. Their colors range from dark red, as in the 'Amish Black' to golden yellow and pure green and any possible intermediate shades, hues, combinations, and russeting. Globular, oblate, cylindrical, or irregular; shaped like barrels, eggs, or pears, many suggesting miniature editions of familiar cultivars. 'Hewe's', 'Taliafero' and other famous cider crab apples of the 19th century fit right into Thoreau's assortment, as do some tidbit cultivars mentioned by his contemporaries:

'Early Strawberry' or 'American Red Juneating': succulent with faintly red-tinged flesh.

'Juneting' of Coxe: pale golden, occasionally faintly blushed.

'Coxe's Golden Drop' or 'Bishop's Thumb': yellow and crimson with russet spots. Juicy, sugary, and vinous.

'Lady Apple' or 'Pomme d'Api': Christmas tidbits. Coxe shipped barrels of them to Philadelphia.

'Summer Rose': "Of singular beauty and excellence." (Coxe)

Some longforgotten dainties found by others in Thoreau's country were named 'Green Sweet', 'Sapson', 'Norfolk', 'Tift Sweeting', and 'Shawmut.'

Discovering and tasting the apples of the wild was one of Thoreau's great pleasures, as he often states. His scrutinizing mind (backed by a fluency in Latin) could not ignore the namelessness of his finds. He baptized them with names "not to be found in any catalogue." (Journal 2:12). Some worthies received colloquial ones, such as 'Wine of New England'; and also a corresponding Linnean type binomial such as Malus vinosa. Another one, which Thoreau found growing near a railroad track, he dubbed 'Railroad Apple'; a name later applied to the 'Delicious' apple when it became a fixture in station shops.

To Thoreau, who did a lot of it, grafting meant progress as long as it did not lead to a monoculture of what he calls "gentle" cultivars. In his book The Maine Woods (posthumous 1864), he tells of those apple trees in the wild or in seedling orchards that are "comparatively worthless for want of a grafter." Later, "it would be a good speculation, as well as a favor conferred upon the settlers, for a Massachusetts boy to go down there with a trunk full of scions, and his grafting apparatus, in the spring."

Wild - that is, uncultivated - apples must have abounded in the Concord countryside, the result of seed dispersal by settlers, natives, cider makers, birds and other animals, even dogs. John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, was a deliberate spreader of apple seeds together with the Good Word. He hailed from Leominster, a few miles from Concord, and had already died in Indiana by the time Thoreau built his cabin.

The botanical taxonomy of these apples is obscured by centuries of selection and neglect; many, as Thoreau points out, were the offspring of all kinds of cultivars brought in by all kinds of immigrants. One can only speculate which of the Malus species set forth by Alfred Rehder in his Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs (1940) contributed to the gene pool of Thoreau's wild apples. From prehistoric to Thoreau's time, likely donors are:

Malus pumila, variously called the 'Wild; 'Common; or 'Original Apple.' The epithet refers to its usually moderate tree size.

Malus sylvestris, the 'Wood Apple' or 'European Wild Apple,' a related species. (Thoreau's Malus sylvatica and Malus sylvestrivallis are private names for two of his finds.)

Malus sieversii, the 'Sievers Apple; a versatile, often large-fruited species from southern Siberia and Mongolia, now considered the cardinal ancestor of edible apples.

Malus orientalis, the 'Eastern Crab' from the mountain valleys east of the Black Sea, with rather hearty cider qualities..

Malus florentina, the 'Italian Crab; a handsome small tree, a candidate since the Romans selected and named their first cultivars.

Malus prunifolia, the 'Plumleaf Crab; existing in a number of forms with red, yellow and orange fruits and a characteristic calyx.

Malus coronaria, the 'Wild Sweet Crab' or 'American Crab; widely distributed in eastern North America.

Malus baccata, the 'Siberian Crab' introduced ca. 1784. Of its two forms, the 'Red Siberian' was described by Forsyth (1803, US ed.) and Coxe (1817). It and the 'Yellow Siberian' or 'Golden Beauty,' offered by Kenrick, were widely planted in New England for their hardiness and cider quality. They retain much of their phenotype growing from pomace.

Malus spectabilis, the 'Chinese Crab; cultivated since at least 1770, was one of the big sellers at William Kenrick's fruit tree nursery at Newton, ten miles from Concord. In his 1833 New American Orchardist he writes, "The fruit is small but tolerable for eating."

Malus augustifolia, the 'Southern Crab' or 'Narrowleaf Crab', and Malus ioensis, the hardier 'Iowa Crab', are considered marginal contenders. The latter is probably the crab apple tree with pink blossoms admired by Thoreau in Minnesota and from his railroad car passing through Michigan. He calls it "half-fabulous" and, following Michaux, a source of cider and "fine sweetmeats."

Malus domestica, the cultivated apple, is not (yet) a true species but a modern "lumping" term for numerous apples selected for their food value. This includes their usually-inferior offspring.

All these species may have contributed to the character of the wild apples Thoreau found in the Boston hinterland and on his travels. Crab apples which he called "wilder still" have recently been defined by another Massachusetts apple tree lover. Donald Wyman of the Arnold Arboretum pronounced, with the approval of his peers, that "The crab apple is any member of the genus Malus which has fruits two inches or less in diameter", regardless of their eating, cider, or ornamental qualities. (Crab Apples in America, 1943.) . Yet the term "scrabba" or "scrab", later "crab", was' introduced into the English language by 8th-century invaders of Britain. These Scandinavians had been seeking out wild apples, preferably edible, since the late Stone Age just as eagerly as Henry David Thoreau, a modern fruit explorer.

(From a modern, issue of H. D. Thoreau's Wild Apples, to be published by Pomona Book Exchange.)

PINK LADIES

April, 1998

An apple cultivar named 'Pink Lady' was introduced in 1989 by the Western Australian Dept. of Agriculture. It is now slated to be accorded a Plant Patent in the United States. The name is already trade marked.

Another 'Pink Lady' was exhibited by this writer at the 1977 NAFEX meeting in Geneva, NY. Much of the similarity of these two Pink Ladies ends with their name.

This writer has no intention of obtaining a plant patent for his Pink Lady and has freely given propagating material to several commercial growers and nurseries in Ontario. He does not believe in plant patents. With the fantastic progress in applied genetics, there is no reason why the cloning privileges plant breeders assign should not be extended to horse breeders, dog breeders, insect breeders and people breeders, i.e., concerned parents. The patenting of living matter is an economic and/or political instrument unrelated to modern genetics.

Commercial growers of the Canadian 'Pink Lady' would eventually infringe on the patent rights of the Australian 'Pink Lady' although they represent very different fruits. At the 1997 NAFEX meeting, a friend suggested 'Old Pink Lady' for the Canadian cultivar; giving this 1966 cross an undeserved antique venerability.

Instead, I herewith give notice of a change of name of the Canadian cultivar from 'Pink Lady' to 'Pink Princess'. After all, her father was King of the Pippins.