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COPYRIGHT 2001 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
Eating apples were first harvested millennia ago in central Asia. Humans have been tinkering with the fruit ever since.
One autumn morning not long ago, I was walking down a row of espaliered apple trees near Geneva, New York. I was visiting the biggest living library of apple trees anywhere in the world--the Plant Genetic Resources Unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), based at Cornell University. The day was cold and the sky leaden, promising an early snow, but maples in full autumn color ringed the field and echoed the cheerful reds, russets, and yellows of the apples. Some of the apple trees had drooping limbs; some grew straight and stiff. The shape of the leaves and the color of the bark varied, as did the fruit--some in clusters, some dangling independently. Some apples were huge, others not even bite-sized. The names of some apples were unfamiliar to me, yet they tasted so good that I wondered why they weren't in markets. Others were so sour or bad-tasting that I quickly understood what apple growers mean by the word "spitters." The trees--and the look and taste of the fruit they bore--were so dissimilar that it was hard to believe the entire group was botanically related. But my guide for the morning, Philip Forsline, curator of apples and sour cherries for the USDA, told me that even bad-tasting ones could be of interest because of their manner of growth, time of bearing, hardiness, or resistance to disease and pests.
Commercial apples are a serious business in the United States, the world's second-largest apple-producing country (after China). Putting in a commercial orchard or replanting an old one with a new variety takes money, time, and labor. Years pass before new trees bear enough fruit to pay back the orchardist for the investment, so apple developers need to be sure of the qualities being packed into a new variety before they promote it. And this is where apples present a real challenge. Nearly every apple tree grown from a seed is a new variety, whose fruit may not be at all like that of the mother tree. Such unpredictability is a serious problem for orchardists. Their most common solution--invented long before there was a sheep named Dolly--has been a type of cloning known as grafting, an ingenious way that humankind discovered to make an end run around the intricacies of apple genetics. Orchardists take a shoot (called a scion) from a tree that bears good eating apples and bind the...
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