(HOST) With spring on the horizon, commentator Mary McCallum is thinking about one of Vermont’s most popular crops, and the seasonal work of pruning and caring for apple trees.
(MCCALLUM) An acquaintance of mine is one of many itinerant pruners who fan out among Vermont’s hilly orchards in late winter and early spring, to climb ladders and expertly remove damaged and diseased branches from healthy trees. In fall she returns as a picker, performing the hard labor described by Robert Frost in "After Apple Picking": There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
This wholesome fruit, originally borne from seeds brought to the New World by early settlers, was grown for cider for the immigrants’ alcoholic drink of choice. Cider mills dotted Vermont’s landscape, and settlers drank their apples – in the form of cider, brandy and applejack. Jelly mills turned cider into thick, tangy brown jelly that kept apples, in another form, on the table all winter. One mill that started producing the jelly in 1882 in Weathersfield is still in business.
While I’m a consumer of cider jelly, hard cider and apples, I know little of the fruit’s history nor how varieties come by their names. Most Americans know about Johnny Appleseed, aka John Chapman, one of the country’s first commercial nurserymen. But contrary to popular myth, he did not scatter apple seeds helter-skelter across our early nineteenth century landscape in hopes of covering it with apple trees.
His was a methodical business venture that created small orchards along routes traveled by early settlers. Johnny moved along with them, selling his young trees to new arrivals. It’s believed but unverified that the last surviving tree he planted still lives in Ohio, and the variety is, of course, the "Johnny Appleseed."
As a lover of language and quirky names, I asked an orchardist friend if she had any to share. The elder apple grower in her family planted 104 trees, one pair of each of the 52 varieties he wanted to cultivate. Among the survivors were the tasty Yellow Bellflower, Ben Davis (a great winter keeper that unfortunately tasted like sawdust), Sheep’s Nose, and the Westfield-Seek-No-Further, named because it was presumed to be completely perfect. Behind many a colorful name lies a story, like the variety Little Lady – so christened because it was tiny enough to tuck into one’s bosom.
I Googled apple varieties in search of names unsung that satisfyingly roll off the tongue. Among roughly 7,500 apple names I found a string worth repeating just for the fun of it: Keswick Codlin, Cripps Pink, Black Gilliflower, Calville Blanc d’Hiver and the lovely Belle de Boskoop.
It’s not easy for our pedestrian sounding Mac and Delicious apples to stand up to names like the musical Xavier de Bavay or the whimsical Ribston Pippin.
Shakespeare asked, "What’s in a name?"
And many of us might reply, "That which we call an apple by any other name would taste as sweet."
Excerpt from the Frost Poem by permission of Henry Holt and Company.