“That’s a Milden,” John Bunker says as he bites into an apple in an abandoned orchard in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in October 2011. He recognizes the variety from its pale yellow color splashed with red, its conical shape, and the flavor, color, and texture of its crisp, juicy flesh. Once relatively common in New England orchards, Milden has all but disappeared. West Coast plant collector and nurseryman Nick Botner sold scions of this variety until his retirement last year, but it’s now commercially unavailable. Little information about it remains.
According to John the next tree is a Baldwin, as are most others in this abandoned orchard. Four of us trail behind him as he walks from tree to tree, tasting apples, examining characteristics of the fruit, unlocking their secrets. We walk carefully to avoid tripping over dense roots and stumps. Until recently this acre or so of land was heavily overgrown, its Mildens, Baldwins, and other as yet unidentified varieties forgotten in the woods. Over the past two years property manager John Greene and his crew have cleared the brush, revealing three dozen stately old trees loaded with surprisingly blemish-free fruit.
John Greene picks one of the Baldwins off a low-hanging branch, shines it on his shirt, and smiles broadly. He knows these trees are unlikely survivors. By John Bunker’s estimate they date back over a hundred years, which means that in addition to escaping the past few decades of rampant development, they lived through the 1934 freeze that destroyed most Baldwins in Maine. Surrounding ocean currents moderate the winter climate here, and the family-run corporation that controls these two-thousand-plus acres has protected it from subdivision. John Greene supervises managed forest, open fields, farmland, and wildlife habitat, including areas designated for the protection of an endangered species in Maine, the New England cottontail rabbit. These Baldwins and Mildens produce fruit year after year that supports other wildlife, like wild turkeys and white-tailed deer. The ground under our feet is covered with apples in varying stages of decomposition, and dozens of bushels remain on the trees, weighing down branches up to twenty-five feet above our heads. Some of the larger trunks, a foot or more in diameter, have tipped over and rooted in place, sending new shoots skyward. Clearly no one has come into this orchard with a pruning saw for the better part of a generation.
John Greene pulls me aside as we finish in this area. “There’s a much older apple tree in the woods near the water,” he says. He describes it as a giant several feet in diameter, near the site of one of the oldest homesteads on this large property. “It’s probably the oldest apple tree in Cape Elizabeth,” he tells me. “Want to go take a look?” Of course I do. He’s never seen any fruit on this ancient tree, so it isn’t worth John Bunker’s time, but maybe I can help figure out if it was ever grafted and pruned. We leave the rest of the group as they head to a younger orchard in a nearby field, hop into the cab of John’s truck, and make our way through a maze of access roads winding through beautiful spruce and fir forest. The roads peter out as we approach a tidal river that links the ocean to nearby marshes. We park and jump out, eyeing the dense underbrush.
“The tree is somewhere over there,” he says, pointing to a nearby clearing. Mindful of tick-borne Lyme disease, which is increasingly common in this area, I wander down the road searching for a break in the vegetation. Meanwhile John forces his way directly into the thickets, and a couple of minutes later shouts that he’s found the tree. “There aren’t any apples,” he confirms, and not much else to see. “Don’t bother trying to get in here,” he shouts. “It’s not worth the trouble.” Soon he bursts out of the brush again, swiping at the front of his pants and clearing away by his estimate more than a dozen ticks.
“What would it take to rescue this tree?” he asks as we climb back into the truck. He wants to know if I’m willing to graft it.
“Easy,” I tell him, “we’d come back in March and take cuttings from the new growth. I could graft scions to new rootstock for you next spring.”
“Are you willing to do that?” he asks.
“Sure, love to,” I say. A stately old apple tree, standing alone in the woods, full of untapped secrets: irresistible.
We know nothing about this tree. It might have been grafted and grown intentionally, or it may have sprouted wild from a seed dropped by a passing deer. But John is a professional forester, and if this apple tree is as old as he believes, it dates back to the days when most surrounding land was cleared for agriculture. Even if this is a wild seedling, there may have been good reason to spare it from the woodsman’s axe. We could be looking at a favorite old dessert fruit, an apple settlers stored for winter eating. Or, more likely, fruit they pressed for cider and fermented into alcohol. Since this tree no longer bears, there’s only one way to know. “I’ll call you in March,” I tell John. We’ll collect scions, graft trees to new rootstock, and in three or four years, if all goes well, taste the fruit.
As I think about this ancient tree over the coming winter, it looms large in my imagination as a potent symbol of all that we’ve forgotten and neglected. To me it represents an enduring sense of place, a relationship to food very different from our own, and ways of living on the land that have all but disappeared. This tree symbolizes resilience, the ability to survive trends and cultural shifts to maintain something of lasting value. I start thinking of it as the cider tree. Cider, not only because most early orchards were planted from seed for this purpose, in a grand, unintentional breeding experiment, but because at one point or another most apple varieties found their way to the press. Cider is at once the humblest of uses for the apple, our most adaptable fruit, and its most forgiving. Whether tannic little crab apples or fine dessert varieties, every fruit can add something of value to the whole in a cider blend.
The winter of 2011–12 is extraordinarily mild in Maine. By early March our limited snowpack is melting away, and spring is stirring in the air. Not a lot of time remains to collect dormant scions before sap starts running in the trees and buds begin to break into new leaves. My brother is in town, and we call John Greene and arrange a visit the following afternoon. We’ll meet at his office, located in a barn at the end of a long private road.
The next day at the appointed time we pull into a muddy parking space and take a look around. John’s office is in a breathtakingly beautiful location, two hundred feet from the shoreline, surrounded by open fields, with an unimpeded view of the ocean and nearby Richmond Island and Scarborough Beach. Today the sky is cloudless; bright sunshine reflects off the remaining snow. The temperature is rising well into the fifties, and the smell of the ocean fills the air. I head into the barn to find John as my brother talks with a friend who’s come along for the visit, a recent transplant to Portland deeply interested in place-based foods and regional culinary traditions.
My friend jumps into the cab of John Greene’s truck with his dog while my brother and I clamber onto the wooden flatbed. We hang on for the ride down an unplowed road as the truck cuts slowly through several inches of remaining snow. John parks at the edge of a field, and we grab our gear and head into the woods. I carry a saw and pruners but leave the aluminum extension ladder on the truck, hoping to avoid lugging it with me.
With the leaves off the trees and a blanket of snow holding down the undergrowth, the late-winter landscape looks very different from last fall. The tree is easily accessible in its small clearing, easy to spot from even a hundred yards away. This is a huge apple tree, standing over thirty feet tall with a trunk about seven feet in diameter. Curiously, we find two other, younger apple trees perfectly aligned in a straight row with their much older cousin. They look like wild seedlings, misshapen and unkempt, never pruned. Could they have sprouted from the stumps of older cultivated trees?
We decide to remove scions from each of these three trees, so one day we can compare the fruit. If any of the apples are identical, or nearly so, this would suggest they were planted intentionally. I squint into the bright sunlight at the base of one of the smaller trees, searching for new growth suitable for grafting. Success depends on finding healthy, year-old shoots at least three or four inches long. The first small tree has a bit of recent growth near its crown, atop a twisting, half-dead trunk. Despite knowing it would be easiest to reach it with the extension ladder, nevertheless I’m feeling either adventurous or too lazy to walk back to fetch it. So I clamber into the branches, lean out precariously to reach the topmost growth, and with a few saw cuts remove enough wood for several grafts.
The next tree is starting to rot, and there’s only one branch worth taking. The trunk sways while I climb and make the cut, removing enough wood for two grafts and throwing it down to my brother. Before I reach the ground and head for the oldest tree, my cider tree, John Greene walks over to it, jumps up, grabs the lowest branch, and pulls himself up. Neither of us likes to stand by and watch; this is too much fun. John reaches for the saw, makes a couple of cuts, and drops enough wood to the ground to graft several new trees. Our work is done. I clip young shoots off the larger branches, add labels, wrap them in plastic bags, and later store them in our refrigerator to remain dormant for another month, until the weather warms and it’s time to graft. If all goes well, in three to four years we’ll return new trees to this site, and give this old variety a chance to persevere into the future.
Like the Endecott pear tree, which has survived every era of American history from the Pilgrims to the post-industrial twenty-first century, this tree has stood alone in the woods for generations as everything around it changed. How fortunate for us that it remains alive and healthy, that we have this opportunity to collect scions and taste the fruit. With luck this apple can escape the fate of so many other historic foods—seeds that died in a cupboard, trees cut down for firewood, animals bred out of existence. As heartening as this is, however, finding such a tree as yet uncollected also reminds me of all that’s been lost. And not only of extinct plant varieties themselves, but our understanding of the place-based traditions that sustained them. While collecting these foods, it’s important that we preserve a working knowledge of their stories, because we protect what we understand and value.
Twenty years ago, when I set out to build a plant collection and regain a sense of place through food, it didn’t work. This was in part because central Washington State wasn’t really my home, and I’d made no long-term commitment to remain there. Even after six years in that beautiful valley, an eternity for anyone under the age of thirty, when asked where I came from the answer was always “Boston.” I understand New England, know that I belong here, and have always felt somewhat rootless when living anywhere else.
Today the only trace that remains of my gardens in Washington, and of the heirloom beans, grains, vegetables, berries, and fruit trees that grew there, is a muddy old planting journal that rests on our bookshelf. Its pages describe my first fledgling efforts to collect and grow rare foods, and they include crude maps listing trees and berries from eastern Washington’s now defunct Bear Creek Nursery. I worked hard to keep those plants alive, watering faithfully by hand from the nearby irrigation ditch, but their continued survival depended on my care. After my departure the twenty or so fruit trees—varieties like Duchess of Oldenburg and Haralson apples, Flemish Beauty and Clapp’s Favorite pears—withered and died. It was a good lesson about stewardship. I didn’t really belong in that place, and didn’t have within me the commitment needed to adapt to it.
What was missing? The answer seems to be partly about ecology and sense of place, partly a larger cultural connection to the community. Although some of the best friends I’ve ever had were in that Washington valley, something about the American West always felt alien to me. I was as displaced as the fruit trees in my gardens. No more a native than the varieties listed in my old journal—Duchess of Oldenburg apples, originally from Russia, imported to this country by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1835 and widely grown in northern Maine; Haralson apples, developed in the early twentieth century at the University of Minnesota; Flemish Beauty pears, originally from Belgium; and Clapp’s Favorite pears, bred in Massachusetts in the nineteenth century by Thaddeus Clapp from a Flemish Beauty tree. Eventually these trees could have adapted and thrived in their new home, but not without ongoing attention and care.
When I left behind my gardens in Washington, it seemed that time had passed by these heirloom foods, and they would never make their way back to most tables. But over the past decade so much has changed. My decision to return to this work several years ago was due in part to deep cultural shifts in our approach to food. These days old hippie co-ops have gone mainstream with chains like Whole Foods, cooking shows attract audiences from all walks of life, and even corporate campuses sprout vegetable gardens and orchards. Today most Americans are aware of what they eat in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. We look at agriculture, cooking, and land use with new eyes, and this has transformed everything for me. It’s possible now to believe that, after I’m gone, others will plant and save seeds from my vegetable collection, care for my fruit trees, and appreciate the stories and rich history behind them. We’re beginning to reclaim traditions that once seemed irretrievably lost. And when these stories have in fact disappeared, we’re picking up the threads and beginning anew—taking scions from old apple trees, experimenting with heirloom seeds, and learning their secrets.
These cultural changes play out for Karla and me every day in the way we cook, eat, and think about our food. After collecting scions with John Greene, my brother and I return to the house and pull out a bottle of hard cider. He brought it with him to Maine from an orchard near his home in Maryland. Karla fills the oven with lamb from a friend’s farm and roasting vegetables from my gardens, regional heirlooms like Canada Crookneck squash, Gilfeather rutabagas, and Early Blood beets. The smell of garlic fills the air. We taste the commercial cider side by side with bottles from our own basement, sampling from trees Eli Cayer and I picked together last fall, and pairing each with aged cheeses from small farms in Maine’s midcoast region. Musty yet sweet, with alcohol levels hovering around 5 percent, the ciders go down easily. We pour glass after glass, comparing respective aromas and flavors, imagining what each apple contributed to the whole.
“Eat it to save it.” This line from my irrepressible friend Poppy Tooker, a chef, preservationist, and food activist from New Orleans, immediately comes to mind as we enjoy the feast. Eat these delicious frost-sweetened beets and rutabagas, these rare squashes, so they can reclaim their place in our fields and on our tables. To this I might add another twist: “Share it to save it.” If these plants remain only in private collections and fail to find their way into the world again through our gardens, farms, and markets, then their richness will be lost to us. Sharing them, connecting them to our everyday lives, is the key to their survival. It’s what matters most. The purpose of these foods is to be eaten.
Toward the end of March 2012, the coming season begins to take shape. Crocuses are blooming, lilacs are starting to bud, and Karla’s two beehives are frenzied with activity. Mustard, lettuce, and arugula sprout in my greenhouse, surrounded by nursery plants showing their first signs of new life. Dozens of fruit scions lie dormant at the back of our refrigerator. These include apples and pears I rescued last week by chance from seven trees in Massachusetts, which may be more than two hundred years old. Most were completely hollowed out and rotting, waiting for someone to come along and save them. Meanwhile many of the trees I planted two years ago are over eight feet tall. We may have our first taste of George IV peaches this summer, if their blossoms can escape late-spring frosts. All the pieces of this puzzle, my effort to create a “farm” to bring new life to rare foods, are starting to make sense. Seeds of an idea planted more than twenty years ago, on the far side of the continent, are bearing fruit.
This patchwork farm of mine isn’t some re-created vision from the past, a romanticized pastoral life. It’s based on the realities of this particular time and space, on collaboration and shared goals. As much as New England’s lost farmsteads have important lessons to teach us, we no longer live in an agrarian world. But if we’re going to reach some new, better place, build on our newfound appreciation for good food, then we need to find creative ways to weave the best of the past into our lives. This is what I believe, and what motivates me to continue my work: that even the smallest garden can express something nearly forgotten, become a pocket of diversity in a world that looks and tastes increasingly the same. It’s up to each of us to decide what we’ll leave to future generations. And the time to begin is now.