Apples in Winter

Orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, New Gloucester, Maine, December 1, 2018

I grew up on a New England farm that, like so many others in the region, had an abundance of old apple trees. In addition to trees along all the stone walls that border the fields and pastures, there was, in times past, a decent-sized orchard on the property. This plentitude was matched by the diversity of varieties present. A map of the orchard (reproduced below), drawn by either my grandfather, Darwin, or great-grandfather, Alexius, indicates approximately 200 trees, of nearly 50 varieties. I shall return to the subject of the family orchard in a bit.

This strong presence of apples in my early life has given me a deep, sentimental fascination with apples and old apple trees. At times it seems as though the trees have a living spirit or personality of their own. They stand, silent and unmoving, as they have for perhaps a century or more, voiceless witnesses to decades of change in the social and economic worlds around them. Their character is especially revealed in winter when the leaves are gone and we see the venerable old things in all their crooked, twisty splendor. The fruit of some varieties clings to the branches well into early winter, as is the case with those pictured here that stand in the orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. This gives one the sense that the trees are refusing to yield to the change of seasons but want to retain the past summer's bounty for as long as possible. I take this as a lesson in persistence. How very Shaker-like.

I am far from alone in my fascination with old apples. In the past generation, as the number of varieties of apples readily available in American supermarkets has shrunk to a predictable half-dozen or so--and many of these either newish types (Honeycrisp) or imports (Braeburn and Gala from New Zealand, and Fuji from Japan)--interest in older, "heirloom" varieties has grown. One of the champions of heirloom apples is John Bunker, from Palermo, Maine. Bunker has established an orchard on his property and runs a CSA devoted to heritage apples. Bunker also founded Fedco Trees which has become a major source of trees for those--like me!--who want to try their hand at raising heirloom apples. The Fedco website is an important source of information about older apple varieties, one that I turn to frequently.

It's impossible to know just how many different types of apples were once grown in this country--I have seen estimates as high as 16,000--but the ±50 varieties in the family orchard is probably a fairly typical number for many older New England farms. A big reason for the bewildering diversity is the nature of apples themselves; if left to their own devices apple seeds don't reproduce replicas of the trees they came from. Apples are "extreme heterozygotes," meaning that they reproduce with unpredictable characteristics. If you have a type of apple that you like and want to be able to keep growing more with the same traits, you have to do so via grafting (i.e., cloning). But their heterozygosity(!) makes it possible to cultivate many different varieties, each with its own attributes. By the same token, if orchardists and nursery owners stop cultivating particular types they will become extinct. Hence the importance of the work of Bunker and Fedco.

While some Biblical scholars suggest that it would be more appropriate for the tree in the tale of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden in Judeo-Christian mythology to be identified as a fig rather than an apple, the cultivation of apples is, in fact, thousands of years old. Apples may well have been the first fruit tree to be cultivated, beginning in what is today Kazakhstan. It is said that apples were introduced to England during the reign of Julius Caesar. Colonists from Britain brought them to the New World early in the 17th century. 

Orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, New Gloucester, Maine, May 16, 2019

New England has, and has not, been a good home for apples. Apples' versatility made them a welcome and valued commodity to self-sufficient Yankees. They're great for baking, for making juice, cider, or vinegar, and--perhaps best of all--for fresh eating right off the tree. In addition to their value for human consumption, apples can be fed to livestock; cows, horses, and pigs are all fond of them. But with the rise of industrialization in the 19th century, and the concomitant migration of New England farmers westward in search of more fertile and less rocky farmland, hundreds of farms in the region were abandoned. Acres and acres of once-cleared land reverted to scrub and forest, effectively swallowing up the old stone walls that had formed the boundaries of hayfields and pastures. And, with the walls, the untended apple trees that grow alongside them. 

"Cider Making," William Sidney Mount, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Henry David Thoreau wrote eloquently about the apples of New England. He termed the apple "the noblest of all fruits," and felt that "the flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and delicious to both sight and scent." However, old Henry was not a fan of the cultivation of apples; he much preferred those that grew wild:

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and bearing qualities--not so much for their beauty as for their fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. Their 'Favorites' and 'Non-suches' and 'Seek-no-farthers,' when I have found them, commonly turn out very tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang or smack to them. 

He would not have been impressed by today's movement to save carefully cultivated heirloom varieties! Thoreau also had a fondness for apples that went unharvested:

Apples in overgrown orchard at Laudholm Farm, Wells, Me

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November. Then they get to be palatable, for they ripen late and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken[.] 

But cultivate apples Yankee farmers certainly did. The orchard on my family's farm was probably fairly typical in terms of size and of the diversity of varieties grown in it. A treasure found among the stash of family documents that came to me when my father passed away and we dispersed the contents of the farm house, is a map of the orchard with a key to the types, location, and quantity of the trees it contained (a typescript of the list is included at the end of this post):

The map raises a few questions. The layout of the trees does not really conform to the configuration of the terrain. The back side of the orchard (the left side of the diagram) was defined by the stone wall that marks the boundary between our place and that of the neighbor's so it was, in fact, straight, as shown on the map. But the front (the right side of the chart) more or less followed the contours of a brook and pond; no straight edges there. A real mystery is the indication of a spring--barely visible on the image here--on the far left side of the map, between the 4th and 5th rows down from the top. There has not been a spring anywhere near that location in my lifetime. Did one perhaps dry up? Is that even a possibility?  One should perhaps view this not as a precise, literal map of the orchard but as a stylized representation of it, of the nature of a schematic drawing. 

I wish I knew more about when the orchard was created, and how much my ancestors might have worked it as a commercial enterprise, or about what other use(s) they might have made of its bounty. Did they make and sell cider? Was there a local market where they sold apples? Did they use any of them for feed for livestock? One thing I do know is that my grandfather exhibited apples at the local fair; I wrote about his produce exhibits in an earlier post. Late in his life my father, Francis, wrote a series of short reminiscences about growing up on the farm in the early 20th century. He included a bit about his own father's apple exhibits:

As our farm then had many apple trees and many varieties, my father spent much time getting ready to exhibit them. He would take many plates of them and also a group of 49 which were in a diamond shape. Some of the varieties were Baldwins, Russetts, Northern Spy, Sweet Russetts, Golden Sweets, Orange Sweets, Sops of Wine, Winesaps, Pippins (a very large apple), Seek-No-Furthers, Sheeps Noses, and a variety which we always called “Good Kind” for want of a better name.

I can remember only one year in which my father harvested and sold apples from the orchard, though my older brothers recall him doing so in earlier times. I was quite young the year I'm thinking of...maybe not even in school. One of my father's older brothers, my Uncle Carl, and his wife, Lucille, were on hand to help. The adults climbed up into the trees on special ladders to pick the ripe apples, or to shake the branches so the fruit would fall on the ground. The apples were going to be sold to make cider so a few bumps and bruises were not fatal to their marketability. It was the job of us younger ones to fill baskets with the fallen fruit, then carry the baskets to the truck where an adult would transfer them to a crate. Picking up apples was the first job on the farm that I ever got paid for--a whopping 10¢ an hour! 

When we had enough crates to make a truck load my father hauled them to a railroad yard in Shelburne Falls, about 20 miles away, where they were loaded into boxcars. It was a big treat for my older sister and me to get to ride along--quite the adventure! I really enjoyed watching the trains coming and going in the yard, and counting the cars on the ones that rolled on through. My memories of this are quite dim, but wonderfully pleasant.

A few years later, probably around the time that I was in 5th or 6th grade, my father had all the trees in the orchard bulldozed to make more open land for pasture and cultivation. This was a big disappointment to me as the orchard had always been a favorite part of the wonderful extended playground that was the farm. There was a bit of a trade-off however--the piles of trees pushed up by the 'dozer made a terrific fort/castle/jungle gym for crawling around in! They eventually rotted away, of course, but lasted just about long enough for me to outgrow the fun of playing in them.

Although the orchard at the farm is long gone, there are still quite a few apple trees standing alongside the stone walls. Age has claimed some, and those that remain have seen better days. But they persist. One venerable Gravenstein tree at the lower end of the field we call the Square Lot holds particular memories for me. Gravensteins are prized as one of the very best pie apples, and as such were held in high esteem by my father. (He was famous for saying "the only thing better than a piece of apple pie is two pieces.") Every fall he would come to me and say, "Paul, I have a little job I need your help with." He'd hand me a basket or pail and together we'd make the short trek across the pasture to the site of the Gravenstein tree; it was something of the nature of a pilgrimage. Pop would climb up into the tree, carefully pick the ripe apples, and toss them down to me to put in the basket. There was no shaking these precious fruits onto the ground!

One often-overlooked benefit of having lots of apple trees around is the recreational opportunities they provide for young farm kids. Climbing them is an obvious possibility. The low branches on most apple trees are not so high up that a kid can't grab onto one and pull himself up into it. Once up in the tree there are plenty more branches to sit on, swing from, or use as ladders to climb even higher.  

Then there were apple fights, the late summer counterpart to winter snowball fights! I can't begin to tell you how many pitched battles we had with friends, cousins, and siblings. We'd just gather up a handful or two of partially-ripe apples and peg them at each other. Yes, they stung when they hit--yeeeowwch!--especially when thrown by bigger and stronger older brothers. But nobody ever got seriously hurt. I don't think.

A more benign activity, and one that required a certain amount of skill, was Apple Throwing; i.e., using a supple stick as a quasi-catapult to hurl apples for distance. This is best done with apples that are about half mature. We'd go into the woods, pocket knives in hand, cut two or three small saplings, maybe 3'-4' long, and sharpen one end of each in order to impale an apple on it. Selecting a stick that was just the right thickness, with just the right degree of flexibility, and then trimming it to just the right length, was a bit of an art. Additional skill was needed to push the apple onto the sharpened tip just far enough so it would not come off prematurely, but not so far that it wouldn't come off at all. Then, using either an overhand or sidearm technique, you'd reach waaaay back, whip the stick rapidly forward, and, with a well-timed flick of the wrist, send the apple flying across the field. If all the variables of suppleness, stick length, apple weight, throwing power, and technical prowess, were in perfect balance, your apple would go whistling through the air at a great rate--far enough, one hoped, that it would clear the stone wall on the opposite side of the field. Or at least travel as far as your older brother's did. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Apples. You can eat them. You can grind them up and drink them. You can bake them in pies and other goodies. You can market them. You can revel in the beauty of their blossoms, with your nose as well as your eyes. You can burn apple wood to make other things taste and smell great. You can feed them to your livestock. You can play games with them. You can climb the trees. As Thoreau said:

"It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man."

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The title of this post, and the photographs of the trees in the orchard at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village that grace the top of the page, were both inspired by the traditional Irish jig, "Apples in Winter." This is actually a "floating" title--i.e., one that in oral tradition has been linked with several different melodies. I offer here notation for the one that in my experience is most often associated with the title. You can hear it played beautifully by my friend Fergal Scahill, of the group, We Banjo 3.

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List of apple varieties formerly in the orchard at the family farm. Numbers after the names presumably indicate the number of trees of each variety. Some of the handwriting is very difficult to decipher. I do not know who drew the map and compiled the list. The list is not in my father's handwriting so it probably was done by either my grandfather, Darwin Wells (1869-1948), or his father, Alexius Wells (1828-1909). Note that there are also two pear trees indicated (nos. 43 and 44). These were likely the source of the pears that Darwin is known to have exhibited at the local fair; see my earlier post about the Cummington Fair. I have added a few small annotations.

1. Greening -- 29 2. Roxbury Russett – 19* 3. Seeknofurther -- 5 4. Sweet Russett -- 6 5. Family Apple – 9 6. Vandiver – 3 7. Nursery – 3 8. Spitsenburg [sic] – 11 9. Sops of Wine – 2 10. Fall Pippin – 7 11. Lady Finger Pairmain [Pearmain] – 4 12. Juneating – 3 13. Baldwin – 23 14. Gravenstein – 2 3  15. Spur Sweet – 3 16. Lady Apple – 2 17. Esq. Packard Apple – 8 18. Fall or Winter Sheep – 2 19. Porter Apple – 2 20. Norman W Apple – 2 21. Orange Sweet – 5 22. Little Core – 5 23. Name unknown – 2 24. Reed cheack [sic] Russett – 1 *Said to be the oldest known variety in America

25. Robbins sweet Russett – 1 26. Early Bough – 5 27. Orange Sour – 3 28. N.Y. Pippin – 3 29. D Towers sweat [sic] Russett – 3 30. Monstrous Pippin – 3 31. Green Seeknofurther – 2 32. Bullock Pippin – 2 33. Loomis Sweet – 2 34. Summer Golden sweet – 3 35. Summer Pearmain – 2 36. Winter Sweet – 2 37. Barr – 2 3 38. Winter Pearmain – 4 3 39. Orange Winter – 1 ** 41. Richardson – 1 42. Jewits [Jewett's] fine Red – 1 43. Grandfather Cobb – 1 (Pear) 44. Howard -- 1 (Pear) 45. Winter Summer Pearmain – 2 46. Mother Apple – 2 47. Danvers Sweet – 7 48. Esopus Spitzenburg – [ ] 49. Northern Spy – 3 ** there is no entry #40

For my own small endeavor in growing heirloom apples I've planted one each: Golden Russet, Red Gravenstein, Westfield Seek-No-Further, Esopus Spitzenburg, and Duchess of Oldenburg. 

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References

The following were very helpful in writing this post:

     Sue Hubbell. "Of Apples in Heaven's  Mountains and in Cow Pastures." Chapter in Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering before We Knew About Genes. Houghton, Mifflin Co., 2001.

     Howard Means. Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story. Simon & Schuster, 2011.

     Russell Steven Powell. Apples of New England: A User's Guide. Countryman Press, 2014.

     Henry David Thoreau. "Wild Apples," essay originally published November, 1862, in The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1862. Reprinted in Wild Apples and Other Natural History Essays. Univ. of Georgia Press, 2002.      

     Roger Yepsen. Apples. Countryman Press,  rev. ed 2017, p. 13.

In addition to the website for Fedco linked above, more information about heirloom apples can be found at: 

Apple Search: The Search for "Lost" Heritage Apples

New England Apples

Epic Gardening

A bit of judicious Googling will no doubt turn up others.