Maine is home to several thousand apple trees that are older than anyone alive on Earth, statewide apple expert John Bunker estimates. Most will start shedding their branches one day and slowly, quietly die.
But once in a rare while, a tree will partially break and fall to the ground, where its branches spread and establish themselves into new trees dozens of feet away.
This process doesn’t have a formal name but is similar to a nursery technique called layering. To witness it in nature is to be struck by the miraculous survival processes of these fruit trees, Bunker said.
New England author Eric Sloane in his 1965 book “A Reverence for Wood” compares the sight of a fallen apple tree surrounded by its connected offspring to a family gathered around a dead giant at his funeral.
“The old tree had dug its branches like fingers into the earth, a strange and striking sequence of resurrection,” Sloane wrote.
For this to happen, the fallen part must be attached to the original tree in some way, according to Bunker. Sometimes the branches will stab into the ground when the tree falls and become the new trunks.
Even a strip of bark connecting the new branch is enough to feed it as it reroots and establishes itself. Eventually the original tree will die. When the process repeats over years, trees move downhill or far across fields.
Bunker, a dedicated researcher of Maine’s heritage apple varieties who lives in Palermo, saw this phenomenon for the first time with an old-timer in Searsmont he’d never met before who showed him an aged Hurlbut apple tree.
When they arrived at the field, Bunker was disappointed by the young, straight tree that looked as if it had been bought from a nursery. Then he saw the gnarled trunk from whence it came, about 20 feet away.
These “new” trees are genetically identical to their source. People reproduce apple trees today by grafting, or attaching a tree cutting to a rooting stock. This results in a tree of the same variety, whereas growing from seed creates something new, a mix of the male and female trees that produced it.
Cuttings from some woody species such as willows will reroot on their own without a rootstock or connection to the original tree, but apple trees won’t.
Another Maine example of the resprouting phenomenon on Mount Desert Island is so old no one knows what variety of apple it is, even with DNA testing. At some point, maybe a century ago, it lay down on the ground. It is decayed almost into compost, but a dozen new sprouts have come off from it, with some 50 to 100 feet away.
“It’s like a magical pretzel forest of young stems,” Bunker said.
He has seen about 20 Maine examples over the years that regrew this way. The tree doesn’t have to break off for it to happen, though. He’ll soon visit a tree in the York County town of Springvale that was partially uprooted during a storm.
Because some part of the root system is still alive in the ground, it can stay where it is, tucked in with compost and left to produce new sprouts. If the homeowners decide to prop it back up and recover the roots, the original tree could reestablish itself upright.
While people are now heavily involved in the lives of apple trees, paying anxious attention to pruning, grafting and fertilizing, the plants have been evolving on their own for millions of years.
Bunker figures they may well outlast us, even through climate change. He’s amazed by their adaptability and variety, which he and fellow enthusiasts will gather to explore at Maine Apple Camp in Hope at the end of August.
“They’ve got it all figured out,” he said of the trees. “They’re absolutely miraculous creatures.”
