On Verona Island, at the end of a dirt road, a couple dozen wizened apple trees stand sentry in a grassy field sloping down to the river.
To the untrained eye, it’s a bunch of old trees. To apple historian John Bunker, it’s a treasure trove of living history.
“Apple varieties that were grown commonly in Maine, 100 to 200, to 250, years ago,” Bunker said.
Cultivars such as the Tolman Sweet, Yellow Bell Flower and Transcendent Crabapple.
Maine is home to hundreds of varieties of heirloom apple trees, but you won’t find most of them in commercial orchards. Instead, these relics of the state’s agricultural past are often tucked away behind an old barn or at the edge of some forgotten farm. Recently, though, several apple historians stumbled across what they say is one of the oldest living apple trees in North America.
Bunker has been crisscrossing the state for decades in search of historic apples, combing through old fair records and pomological reports — the official name for apple studies — and gathering first hand accounts.
“People who knew that there was something about these old varieties that represented generations of what I call baton passing,” Bunker said.
Bunker said he’s often searching for living examples of variants named in historical documents. Other times, like a pomological Sherlock Holmes identifying a suspect, he’s trying to run the process in reverse.
“But then the other thing you have — you have an old tree, but no name, so now it’s like, ‘Who is this?’”
Bunker said that was the question for one small, particularly old looking tree at the far edge of this Verona Island orchard.
“It looks to me as though it was once several times larger. Half the trunk is gone,” Bunker said.
And what’s left of the trunk is largely hollow. The brownish gray bark is patterned with splotches of green moss and blue lichen. Three twisted limbs branch off to one side, pushing out a crown of spindly new growth adorned with delicate, light pink flowers.
A couple years ago, some of Bunkers’ fellow apple historians sent leaf samples from this tree, along with hundreds of others, to a lab for genetic testing.
“And we got this email saying, oh my goodness, you have found the only apple of this that we know of in North America,” he said.
“Oh, my God, yes. This is it!” recalled Cameron Peace, the tree fruit geneticist at Washington State University who coordinated the testing.
“It” being the Drap D’Or de Bretagna — or Golden Cloth of Brittany, in French. Peace said it’s one of a few historic apples that are the genetic ancestors of many of the common varieties we eat today, and that the Verona Island tree is the only known living specimen in North America.
Peace said the Drap D’Or is one of the earliest common ancestors, making it even more special.
“Being oldest means it was least likely to be discovered, more likely that it’s disappeared,” Peace said.
Peace can’t determine the exact age of a tree based on a leaf sample alone, but the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association said it’s at least 200 years old, making it one of the oldest living apple trees in North America.
And now it’s got a sibling — technically, a grafted clone — at the association’s Heritage Orchard in Unity.
Orchard manager CJ Walke demonstrates the grafting process, which is essentially fusing three twig cuttings from one tree onto the branch of another.
He says preserving heirloom trees safeguards agricultural history and genetic traits that could offer keys in adapting to climate change.
“[We’re] hoping that there are some resilient characteristics in some of these varieties that might help apple propagation into the future,” Walke said.
Apple historian Bunker meanwhile is preserving the Drap D’or in more ways than one, including a painting of the fruit.
He’s also grafted cuttings into his own orchard in Palermo.
With proper care, he said the Verona Island tree could still have quite a bit of life left in it.
“Even though it’s hollow and hardly rooted to the ground, you know, it can be there another — maybe it’ll be there another 100 years,” he said. “So long after we’re all gone.”
This year, come harvest time, Bunker said the plan is to bring some of the apples to agriculture fairs to give the public a chance to step back 200 years in time with a bite of the tree’s golden yellow fruit.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
