As American as Apple Pie

The chief backyard fruit trees I recall from my Pennsylvania childhood were these: an apple tree that annually bore six or eight stunted, less than half-edible fruits; a peach tree whose promising crop succumbed every June to a gummy mess I now recognize as having been caused by the plum curculio; and a plum tree, the most beautiful flowering object I have ever seen, that in about 18 years of life managed just one summer to produce two unimaginably delicious plums the size of cocktail olives.

An informed eye looking over this list would see why the great Old World fruit trees brought to the Americas were usually destined to become Trees of Knowledge as disillusioning, in their sphere, as the biblical one. Not much survives to be plucked from them without well-informed investments of money, attention, time, labor and poison.

I kept seeing our Addams Family orchard as I read Frank Browning’s “Apples” and “The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello” by Peter J. Hatch, director of gardens at Thomas Jefferson’s living laboratory. The two books between them present large, thought-provoking chunks of an unfinished national story beginning with the first person who found a fruit tree sprouting in a colonial midden and proceeding up to the latest produce section exhibit of apple or apricot travesties.

Early on in this continuing American tale, creating a select private orchard (commercial ones came later) could be seen by people of means and taste as an aesthetic or even philosophical pursuit. The Monticello we explore in Hatch’s handsome illustrated study typifies a certain Age of Enlightenment vision--and what could go wrong with it.

Jefferson’s very long life (1743-1826) saw a phenomenal transition in which American commercial orchards full of painstakingly cloned cultivars ended the old primacy of random, nameless trees grown from seed whose fruit mostly went into cider or its peach equivalent, mobby. Nobody, of course, used the word “cloned,” but that’s the essential meaning of “making” Newton Pippin apple trees or Seckel pear trees (to name two current cultivars that Jefferson knew) by grafting slips from those stocks onto previously planted rootstock.

As Hatch shows, Jefferson maintained a large workaday orchard of anonymous apples and peaches probably meant to furnish cider, mobby or even hog fodder. But his pride and joy was a six-acre “fruitery” dedicated to grapes and assorted berries as well as fruit trees. Many of its trees were carefully chosen clones, American-developed as well as collected during his European travels, with a lot of stock from the commercial nurseries that began appearing around Philadelphia and New York shortly before the Revolutionary War.

Most of the book is a survey of individual fruits that discusses the general state of each during Jefferson’s lifetime and describes cultivars known to have been in the Monticello fruitery. It makes splendid.

Hatch keeps dropping in engaging tidbits like an episode of exploding cider bottles at Monticello in 1793 or an incursion of fruit-stealing schoolboys some time around 1806. But far more absorbing are some major motifs.

It’s soon clear that Hatch sees the historical Monticello not as an objectively re-creatable monument but as a shifting experiment-in-progress that always reflected both its creator’s profound elusiveness and necessarily incomplete grasp of problems not fully identified in his lifetime. Jefferson’s own planting records suggest that for every kind of tree or vine that flourished at Monticello, others required many new plantings to recoup repeated losses or steadily dwindled (e.g., apricots and plums) or simply failed (almonds). Barren trees and shriveled excuses for fruit must have been common sights in his carefully planned orchard rows.

Part of the reason seems to lie in Jefferson’s remarkably inconsistent attention to the advice of colleagues and the writers of manuals. (Hatch gives the impression of having been engaged in a decades-long debate with the Founding Father on his ambitious but messy management of wine grapes.) Other problems, however, were universal and have persisted to this day, though they seldom come to the notice of anyone but growers.

To eager orchardists, North America might at first have looked like a paradise for raising fruit. But the serpent quickly emerged in the form of ill-timed frosts, cruel summers and numberless indigenous plagues to which the apples, peaches and other fruits native to the Old World were especially susceptible.

Some of the new cultivars that sprouted here showed increased hardiness and adaptability; others had their own Achilles’ heels. The commercial orchards that spread over the landscape in the 1830s and ‘40s would prove to be a standing dinner invitation to one scourge after another.

For amateur horticulturists like Jefferson, these frustrations had been foreshadowed much earlier.

Hatch reports at length on the pests to which trees like those at Monticello are subject (fire blight, peach borer, the ever-sprightly curculio) and the measures suggested against them at the time, which ranged from wrapping peach tree trunks in cured tobacco leaves to dispelling buildups of electrical “fluid” by “hanging iron objects like old horseshoes” on pear trees. Anyone who didn’t already know that fruit-growing looks more romantic from the outside than the inside will come away from the book recognizing that a working “fruitery” is a hard-won achievement.

As seen here, Monticello fascinatingly crystallized an age full of promise, puzzlement and contradictions. It was a place quintessentially Jeffersonian: the creation of a man who loved experimenting with unions of the useful and the beautiful. He hoped to bring the best of Europe and America to intertwined fruition--and tended to begin things, rather than see them through as a real orchardist. As Hatch remarks more than once in a tone smacking of mingled admiration and regret, “Thomas Jefferson was a planter, rather than a cultivator.”

*

A generation or two ago, a fair number of small family orchards still hung on in corners of the American landscape and drew sturdy local crowds in season. Frank Browning’s parents owned one in northern Kentucky. Browning, who still runs his family orchard with his brother, has seen enough good and bad developments in the near past to make him both apprehensive and cautiously optimistic about the future. His vivid and idiosyncratic “Apples,” the only general pomology-for-laymen survey in print, isn’t really meant as a systematic history but certainly brings a lot of recent and distant events into forceful focus.

Nearly all of Browning’s account is played out against the backdrop of the new genetic insights that opened up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Western scientists first learned of the great wild apple forests in eastern Kazakhstan near the Chinese border. It’s likely that these are the ancestral home of all cultivated apple varieties.

For thousands of years the Kazakh trees reproduced by the normal sexual devices of trees while modern orchard trees in western Europe and America were turning into a limited set of clones. Thus they represent a huge “new” gene pool for breeding desired traits into apples. Coming at the very moment when American researchers are starting to plan apple-genome maps, this discovery may eventually give orchard trees actual genetic defenses against ancient enemies--insects, diseases, hostile weather--that formerly had to be fought with pesticides or couldn’t be fought at all.

In the context of the contemporary American--and global--apple industry, Browning seems to see these developments as a dramatic convergence of crisis and opportunity. “Crisis” may not be the word he’d use. But the general situation he sketches certainly is replete with troubling portents.

To extract only a few of Browning’s most trenchant points: Apple orchards today are incredibly concentrated, rapidly producing tree factories (an achievement made possible by “dwarfing” or “semi-dwarfing” rootstocks that drastically reduce the adult size of trees grafted onto them as young slips), nearly always run by people who know how to grow, not sell. A toilsome shipping-storage-distribution system leaves orchardists stuck at one end, consumers at the other. What the former do tends to be dictated by a general belief that the latter wants nothing but impossibly shiny, smooth, sweet apples in a few accepted color schemes.

As Browning explains, the emphasis on cosmetics has shifted the major seat of apple production to near-desert locations in the Far West or Northwest (dry air makes glossy skins) accessible only to giant brokers who call the tune for the growers and, of course, for us, the eaters. Their priorities relegate the best, most gloriously juicy, crisp, aromatic, sweet-tart seasonal apples to cult status while five or six cultivars reign 12 months of the year in supermarket bins and chic groceries alike. Browning finds that at the biggest, fanciest produce section in Wenatchee, Wash., the world capital of apple growing, the produce manager has to think hard to remember what a Winesap is.

Prospects for marketing more adventurous choices at anything resembling a profit will depend less on quality than on carving out future niches in shoppers’ minds by such means as trade-marking entire cultivars--in Browning’s phrase, “a new sort of food tribalism” in the making. Meanwhile, the apple industry watches its mealy, insipid red progeny being progressively eclipsed at the checkout counter by cheap packaged snack foods that offer at least some crude reward to the taste buds.

This programmatic-sounding summary leaves out the freewheeling gusto of “Apples.” In bold and mercurial prose, Browning slaloms through a range of subjects from folklore to pesticides to cider-making. For me, the most exciting sections are his accounts of the Kazakh discoveries and the answering efforts being carried out at the world’s most important research collection of apple stocks, the Agricultural Experiment Station and germ-plasm bank in Geneva, N.Y.

To carp at so intelligent and seriously needed a book may seem small-minded. But Browning has a habit of galloping on to another subject when he’s scarcely finished thinking the last one through and of neglecting to check simple (sometimes complex) facts. His excursions into philology and classical or Norse mythology often have a slapdash air, and the way in which he retails material from secondary sources doesn’t always suggest that he knows the original ones. It’s jarring to come on scientific muddles like the statement that “peas are homozygous. Apples, like humans, are heterozygous”--a silly distortion indicating that Browning doesn’t understand the nature of alleles, or dominant/recessive pairings of genes governing particular traits. (If peas were purely homozygous--dominant/dominant or recessive/recessive--for all traits, Gregor Mendel would never have had anything to experiment with.)

We can legitimately expect better from someone capable of a bolt of historical insight as mind-opening as Browning’s response to the question of whether genetic manipulation is “natural”:

“The only genuinely honest answer is that nature herself is a trick, a confection of Enlightenment thinking, a projection to some lost pristine paradise that periodically resurfaces in utopian fantasies. Neither today’s apple nor Granddad’s was natural.”