Adam's Apples

Vincent van Gogh Eugene Crockett died suddenly in early 1932, leaving a family, a thousand fruit trees, and a pile of debt in the pit of the Depression. Only his daughter, Kitty, wanted to keep the orchard or thought it would be possible to do so.

Open almost any page in Roger Yepsen's Apples to find a charming tableau. On the right-hand page is a watercolor painting of an apple, rendered by the author with reverent realism. Facing on the left is a verbal sketch of the apple. These are not long. Several comprise only three sentences. The images float on the white page. The text, though brief, tells the essential things you'd want to know about each variety, including origin, character, and time of peak ripeness. When you are done with one apple, turn the page for another. There are more than a hundred of these.

The apple harvest may have been uneven , but we've had a bumper crop of apple books. They are a joy to read in the bleak off season. The challenge in writing such a book is to stay engaging while stepping through many apple descriptions. To make the descriptions parallel enough to permit comparisons without falling into deadly similarity. To use the descriptions to say something as a whole as well as many things in particular. Rowan Jacobsen, in his Apples of Uncommon Character (Bloomsbury 2014) won me over early with his voice and his views.

Published last fall, Apples of New England is a rich guide to a topic close to my heart. The small volume is somewhere between a coffee-table book, a primer, and a reference. The author, Russell Steven Powell, is the former executive director of the New England Apple Association ; he keeps his own apple blog . Documentation of each apple includes meticulous photos by Barr Lois Weeks, the current director. In addition to a catalog of hundreds of varieties, Powell tells us some of the central stories about apples, with an emphasis on their New England roots in America.

public-domain image Eccentric and saintly, Johnny Appleseed is an unlikely member of the pantheon of American folk superheros that includes such he-men as Davey Crockett, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry. Like Crockett, Johnny Appleseed was a real person, though his name was John Chapman. Born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in the early days of the American Revolution, Chapman grew up in Westfield and headed west to become a frontier nurseryman, bachelor, and sometime Swedenborgian evangelist. He gleaned apple seeds from cider mills and eked out a living planting them and selling saplings to settlers.

Set the  Wayback Machine  to 1905 and put your finger on the pomological pulse of New York and the world. The New York State Department of Agriculture has just published the latest edition of The Apples of New York, including detailed descriptions of every variety then grown in the Empire State (regardless of place of origin). Today, this work is out of print, in the public domain, digitized, and online. Look in vain for modern favorites, but thrill to descriptions of lost flavors of yesteryear.