
The birthplace of the modern apple - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181120-the-birthplace-of-the-modern-apple
======
mark-r
Interesting trivia: the apple trees planted by Johnny Appleseed in the US were
not meant for edible consumption, they were meant for hard cider. The apples
were practically inedible.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-
appl...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/real-johnny-appleseed-
brought-applesand-booze-american-frontier-180953263/)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Almost all apples coming from planted seed are practically inedible.

Only a small percentage turn out to be useful for eating, cooking or cider.
Once you find one that is the whole population comes from grafts and cuttings.
All the varieties we know came from a single, often accidental, tree
somewhere.

If you happen to lose all stock of an old variety you have roughly no chance
of ever recreating it.

~~~
ci5er
Are you sure?

I seem to remember my grandfather taking me to transplant saplings that grew
from seeds from fallen apples from around a few trees.

I was young, and my alcoholic memory is faulty, but I don't recall any
grafting. (This was in the blast plains of Wyoming, so, not near the idyllic
nooks of the Idaho Rockies)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
You can grow from seed, and they do inherit characteristics of parents, but
they are also very, very variable. They can vary to such an extent you will
often get a completely new variety. Some will be closer. Cider is perhaps less
dependent on consistency, particularly rough cider, than you'd want from
eating apples.

They are not consistent like the seeds of many other plants. Apples seeds seem
to produce more variation than other fruits, though other fruits share this
tendency.

Still, if you want an orchard of consistently good cider apples you'd plant
grafts from a consistently good cider apple on a suitable root (dwarf, cold-
resistant and so on). If you hope to find a new, interesting, variety or can
live with that variation you'd plant many seeded trees and see what fruit
results. Then keep, and propagate, the good ones. :)

More here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Cultivation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Cultivation)

~~~
ci5er
Thank you.

We probably ended up with 10 or 14 trees in total (there would have been more,
but crop dusters in the north of our place kept not dusting low enough and
their herbicides would kill our trees ... which is a travesty on the blast
plains, but what are you going to do?), and we didn't notice a heck of a lot
of variability, but there was certainly some.

They were mostly all medium-ish sized and red-ish - and only fruited once per
year. They tasted kind of like a McIntosh I guess? But you are right - they
were a lot more variable between themselves than the cherries or (say) the
berries or rhubarbs.

FWIW: I wasn't particularly interested in cider apples - I was interested in
the claim that apples can't be grown and kept consistent from seeds.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Interesting. When I was a young un a relative did something similar, after
they were winding down the orchards, thanks to changing markets. I remember
more than a couple as inedible failures that were dug up, but came from good
eating varieties. A short time later all except just a couple were gone and he
was growing house plants and for garden centres.

Now I'm past my knowledge or knew less than I thought I did. Maybe some parent
varieties vary more wildly than others?

~~~
ci5er
Maybe. I don't know. Your comment simply caught my "is that so?" filter. I'm
going to have to go learn more. Thank you.

------
kdeldycke
There's a couple of other species which have more recently contributed to the
modern varieties by genetic introgressive hybridization. See for instance M.
Sylvestris, the European wild apples: *
[https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002703)
*
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016895251...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016895251300190X)

