Which Came First?

THE APPLE OR THE APPLE?

PHOTO: CAPTAIN ORANGE (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Consider the Cherryfield apple, also known as Collins in its early years.

This is a Maine variety that was also identified, tentatively, with Benton Red, another apple from the Pine Tree State.

This 1907 report of the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station says authoritatively that Cherryfield is a "chance seedling on the farm of the late Wyman B. Collins, Cherryfield, Me., about 50 years ago," i.e. 1857 or so.

The date is important.

A "chance seedling" is a pippin, grown from seed, not a graft. "Original tree is still standing" in 1907.

Salome

With equal conviction, Guy Bryant, in the 1913 Transactions of the Horticultural Society of Northern Illinois, told how Elias Hathaway originated Salome in his nursery near Ottawa, Illinois in 1869.

More precisely, that Hathaway bought the nursery, untended for several years, and found the young tree growing there. He nurtured and promoted the apple, naming it for his mother.

Consequently, the tree must be a bit older than 1869. The nursery was started in 1853 and was subsequently neglected "as the result of one of its owners dying."

Hathaway bought it "a few years later." The fall of 1869 is the year he "determined to clear out the trees, only leaving a few of the best that he know bore fine fruit."

Thus, the tree was old enough to bear in 1869, or perhaps earlier, if Hathaway based his culling decision on experience from prior years.

Hathaway was right about Salome, by the way. It is an excellent apple.

Whence the Sapling?

Bryant also reports that Hathaway's Salome sapling

was a seedling of a root graft, the scion of which had failed to grow.

That's useful because nurseries tag trees. Their business model depends on keeping records.

Unfortunately the mark placed on this seedling was by some means either lost or overlooked by the men set to do the work and the tree was cut down.

So it is unclear if Salome grew from a graft or from rootstock. Or if that part of Bryant's story is wrong and it is another "chance seedling." (Other accounts say just that.)

Just to tease things out a little further: Bryant also reports that the sprout that Hathaway nurtured from the stump was so vigorous as to bear fruit in 1872, just 3 years later.

Enough fruit that he "exhibited it in 1872 at the horticultural societies."

From stump to exhibit hall in 3 years. How likely is that?

Meanwhile, Back in Maine

Today, the cost of a DNA analysis continues to fall as the technology advances and spreads. Recently the Maine Heritage Orchard and Fedco Trees commissioned genetic work-ups on several local varieties.

(Maine has a particularly rich apple heritage.)

The analysis identified the ancestry of the Black Oxford apple (Blue Pearmain and Hunt Russet).

It confirmed that Cherryfield and Benton Red were, indeed, one and the same.

And also, which no one had suspected, that both were the same as Salome.

How could that be? One of these origin stories must be wrong.

Thus does science unfold new truths linked to new mysteries.

Occam's Razor Cuts Hathaway's Apple

Mostly likely, the original owners of that failed Ottawa greenhouse grafted some Cherryfield budwood, perhaps directly from Maine.

That would make that Cherryfield tree, "still standing" in 1907, the true ortet.

The timing is tight but feasible, assuming (a) Cherryfield was well established by 1857 and (b) the original Ottawa owners planted a Cherryfield graft in the early to mid 1860s.

To write the story the other way, one would have to discount the tale of the ca. 1857 Cherryfield and date it from no sooner than 1878. That's the earliest (it seems to me) someone might have brought Salome budwood from Illinois to Maine.

It wouldn't be established in the Cherryfield area until some time after that.

That seems unlikely on its face! But Clio (the Muse of History) can be as confounding as science.

• Maine DNA testing
• Salome-Cherryfield–Benton Red
• Clio, Muse of History