The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (7 page)

The Geneva orchard is, among other things, a museum of the apple’s golden age in America, and a few weeks after my trip to the Midwest, I traveled here, alone, to see what of Johnny Appleseed’s legacy I might find in its corridors. At first glance the orchard looks much like any other, the tidy rows of grafted trees advancing like rails to the horizon. But it doesn’t take long before you begin to notice the stupendous variety of these trees—in color, leaf, and branching habit—and the metaphor of a library begins to fit: endless shelves of books that are alike only superficially. When I visited, it was late October, and most of the trees were bent with ripe fruit, though many others had already dropped stunning cloaks of red and yellow and green on the ground around them.

I spent the better part of a morning browsing the leafy aisles, tasting all the famous old varieties I’d read about—the Esopus Spitzenberg and Newtown Pippin, the Hawkeye and the Winter Banana. Almost all of these classic varieties were chance seedlings found in exactly the sort of cider orchards John Chapman sponsored, and no doubt there are apples in this orchard that came from the seeds he planted in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. There’s just no way of knowing which ones they are.

As I worked my way up and down the aisles, consulting a computerized directory that the collection’s curator, Phil Forsline, had printed out for me, I concentrated on the varieties listed as “American” and thought about exactly what that meant. By planting so many apples from seed, Americans like Chapman had, willy-nilly, conducted a vast evolutionary experiment, allowing the Old World apple to try out literally millions of new genetic combinations, and by doing so to adapt to the new environment in which the tree now found itself. Every time an apple failed to germinate or thrive in American soil, every time an American winter killed a tree or a freeze in May nipped its buds, an evolutionary vote was cast, and the apples that survived this great winnowing became ever so slightly more American.

A somewhat different kind of vote was then cast by the discriminating orchardist. Whenever a tree growing in the midst of a planting of nameless cider apples somehow distinguished itself—for the hardiness of its constitution, the redness of its skin, the excellence of its flavor—it would promptly be named, grafted, publicized, and multiplied. Through this simultaneous process of natural and cultural selection, the apples took up into themselves the very substance of America—its soil and climate and light, as well as the desires and tastes of its people, and even perhaps a few of the genes of America’s native crab apples. In time all these qualities became part and parcel of what an apple in America is.

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In the years after John Chapman began plying his trade through the Midwest, America witnessed what has sometimes been called the Great Apple Rush. People scoured the countryside for the next champion fruit. The discovery of a Jonathan or Baldwin or Grimes Golden could bring an American fortune and even a measure of fame, and every farmer tended his cider orchard with an eye to the main chance: the apple that would hit it big. “Every wild apple shrub excites our expectations thus,” Thoreau wrote, “somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! . . . Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.”

The nationwide hunt for pomological genius, the odds of which were commonly held to be eighty thousand to one, brought forth literally hundreds of new varieties, including most of the ones I was now tasting. I can report, however, that not all these children of Chapman are outstanding to eat: many of the apples I sampled that morning were spitters. The Wolf River is particularly memorable in this respect. It had the yellow, wet-sawdust flesh of a particularly tired Red Delicious without even a glint of that apple’s beauty.

The sheer profusion of
qualities
that Americans discovered in the apple during its seedling heyday is something to marvel at, especially since so many of those qualities have been lost in the years since. I found apples that tasted like bananas, others like pears. Spicy apples and sticky-sweet ones, apples sprightly as lemons and others rich as nuts. I picked apples that weighed more than a pound, others compact enough to fit in a child’s pocket. Here were yellow apples, green apples, spotted apples, russet apples, striped apples, purple apples, even a near-blue apple. There were apples that looked prepolished and apples that wore a dusty bloom on their cheeks. Some of these apples had qualities that were completely lost on me but had meant the world to people once: apples that tasted sweeter in March than October, apples that made especially good cider or preserves or butter, apples that held their own in storage for half a year, apples that ripened gradually to avoid a surfeit or all at once to simplify the harvest, apples with long stem or short, thin skin or thick, apples that tasted sublime only in Virginia and others that needed a hard New England frost to reach perfection, apples that reddened in August, others that held off till winter, even apples that could sit at the bottom of a barrel for the six weeks it took a ship to get to Europe, then emerge bright and crisp enough to command a top price in London.

And the names these apples had! Names that reek of the American nineteenth century, its suspender-popping local boosterism, its shameless Barnum-and-Bailey hype, its quirky, un-focus-grouped individuality. There were the names that set out to describe, often with the help of a well-picked metaphor: the green-as-a-bottle Bottle Greening, the Sheepnose, the Oxheart, the Yellow Bellflower, the Black Gilliflower, the Twenty-Ounce Pippin. There were the names that puffed with hometown pride, like the Westfield Seek-No-Further, the Hubbardston Nonesuch, the Rhode Island Greening, the Albemarle Pippin (though the very same pippin was known as the Newtown nearer to Newtown, New York), the York Imperial, the Kentucky Red Streak, the Long Stem of Pennsylvania, the Ladies Favorite of Tennessee, the King of Tompkins County, the Peach of Kentucky, and the American Nonpareille. There were names that gave credit where credit was due (or so we assume): the Baldwin, the Macintosh, the Jonathan, McAfee’s Red, Norton’s Melon, Moyer’s Prize, Metzger’s Calville, Kirke’s Golden Reinette, Kelly’s White, and Walker’s Beauty. And then there were the names that denoted an apple’s specialty, like Wismer’s Dessert, Jacob’s Sweet Winter, the Early Harvest and Cider Apple, the Clothes-Yard Apple, the Bread and Cheese, Cornell’s Savewell and Putnam’s Savewell, Paradise Winter, Payne’s Late Keeper, and Hay’s Winter Wine.

How many other fruits do we call by their Christian names? True, there are a handful of monikered pears and a famous peach or two, but no other fruit in history has produced so many household names—so many celebrities!—as the nineteenth-century apples planted by Chapman and his ilk. Like sports franchises or politicians, each had its contingent of supporters, including a few diehards who could direct you to the semisacred spot on which that apple had first stood (the site often marked with a monument) and recite its biography, the often astounding story of how its genius was first discovered purely by chance, nearly overlooked, and then given its rightful due.

There was the story about the surveyor who stumbled on the Baldwin growing by a Boston canal, or the one about the farmer who noticed the neighborhood boys drawn each winter to the falls around a certain tree that turned out to be the York Imperial, the “king of keepers.” And then there was the stubborn, possibly miraculous seedling that kept coming up in between the rows of Jesse Hiatt’s orchard in Peru, Iowa, mowing after mowing, until the Quaker farmer decided it must be a sign. So he let the little tree live and fruit, only to discover its apples were far and away the best he’d ever tasted. Hiatt named it the Hawkeye and in 1893 mailed four of them off to a contest at the Stark Brothers Nurseries in Louisiana, Missouri, where C. M. Stark awarded the Hawkeye first prize and a shiny new name: the Delicious. (Stark, a born marketer, had been carrying that name on a slip of paper in his pocket for years, waiting for just the right apple to come along and claim it.) Alas, Jesse Hiatt’s entry card was somehow misplaced amid the hoopla, setting off a frantic yearlong search for what would eventually become the world’s most popular apple.

There must have been dozens of apple stories more or less in this vein, rags-to-riches fables about a fruit, linking an exemplary tree to a particular American person and place. The parables brought proof not only that the American ground was “fruitful of excellences,” in Henry Ward Beecher’s excellent phrase, but that Americans themselves had an eye for the main chance and that in America merit would win out in the end. Somehow, this piece of fruit had became a bright metaphor for the American dream.

But why this particular species? Beecher himself said it was because the apple was “the true democratic fruit.” Happy to grow just about anywhere, “whether neglected, abused or abandoned, it is able to take care of itself, and to be fruitful of excellences.” The Horatio Alger apple that emerged from a nineteenth-century seedling orchard was also in some sense “self-made,” something that can’t be said about many other plants. The great rose, for example, is the result of careful breeding, the deliberate crossing of aristocratic parents—“elite lines,” in the breeder’s parlance. Not so the great apple, which distinguishes itself from “the hosts of unoriginal men” without reference to ancestry or breeding. The American orchard, or at least Johnny Appleseed’s orchard, is a blooming, fruiting meritocracy, in which every apple seed roots in the same soil and any seedling has an equal chance at greatness, regardless of origin or patrimony.

Befitting the American success story, the botany of the apple—the fact that the one thing it won’t do is come true from seed—meant that its history would be a history of heroic individuals, rather than groups or types or lines. There is, or at least there was, a single Golden Delicious tree, of which every subsequent tree bearing that name has been a grafted clone. The original Golden Delicious stood until the 1950s on a hillside in Clay County, West Virginia, where it lived out its golden years inside a padlocked steel cage wired with a burglar alarm. (The cage setup was a publicity stunt organized by Paul Stark, C.M.’s brother, who bought the tree in 1914 for the then-princely sum of $5,000.) Today a granite monument marks the spot where the original Red Delicious grew, between the rows on Jesse Hiatt’s Iowa farm. These were two of the many giants that walked what Andrew Jackson Downing called “the young American orchard.”

So what native-plant zealot would dare to challenge the right of such trees to call themselves American now? Their ancestors may have evolved half a world away, but these apples have by now undergone much the same process of acculturation as the people who planted them. In fact, they’ve gone further than the people ever did, for the apples reshuffled their very genes in order to reinvent themselves for life in the New World.

Several of these Americans have since found homes in distant lands (the Golden Delicious now grows on five continents), but many others thrive in America and nowhere else and in some cases are adapted to life in but a single region. The Jonathan, for example, achieves perfection strictly in the American Midwest (which is somewhat surprising, considering it was discovered in the Hudson Valley). My guess is that the Jonathan would be as out of place in England or Kazakhstan, the native ground of its ancestors, as I would be in Russia, the native ground of my own. The arrow of natural history won’t be reversed: by now the Jonathan’s as much an American as I am.

• • •

The golden age of American apples that John Chapman helped to underwrite lives on in the Geneva orchard—yet just about no place else. In fact, the sole reason for its existence is that these erstwhile giants of the young American orchard, the actual and metaphorical descendants of Appleseed’s apple seeds, have been all but killed off by the dominance of a few commercially important apples—that, and a pinched modern idea of what constitutes sweetness. A far more brutal winnowing of the apple’s prodigious variability took place around the turn of the century. That’s when the temperance movement drove cider underground and cut down the American cider orchard, that wildness preserve and riotous breeding ground of apple originality. Americans began to eat rather than drink their apples, thanks in part to a PR slogan: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Around the same time, refrigeration made possible a national market for apples, and the industry got together and decided it would be wise to simplify that market by planting and promoting only a small handful of brand-name varieties. That market had no use for the immense variety of qualities the nineteenth-century apple embodied. Now just two of these qualities counted: beauty and sweetness. Beauty in an apple meant a uniform redness, by and large; russeting now doomed even the tastiest apple.

As for sweetness, the complicated metaphorical resonance of that word had by now been flattened out, mainly by the easy availability of cheap sugar. What had been a complex desire had become a mere craving—a sweet tooth. Sweetness in an apple now meant sugariness, plain and simple. And in a culture of easy sweetness, apples now had to compete with every other kind of sugary snack food in the supermarket; even the touch of acid that gives the apple’s sweetness some dimension fell out of favor.
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And so the Red and Golden Delicious, which are related only by the marketing genius of the Stark brothers (who named and trademarked them both) and their exceptional sweetness, came to dominate the vast, grafted monoculture that the American orchard has become. Apple breeders, locked in a kind of sweetness arms race with junk food, lean heavily on the genes of these two apples, which can be found in most of the popular apples developed in the last few years, including the Fuji and the Gala. Thousands of apple traits, and the genes that code those traits, have become extinct as the vast flowering of apple diversity that Johnny Apple-seed sponsored has been winnowed down to the small handful of varieties that can pass through the needle’s eye of our narrow conceptions of sweetness and beauty.