Apple

In the mountains of Central Asia, mostly in south-eastern Kazakhstan, grows a wild apple, Malus sieversii. It is the main ancestor of every apple in the shops. 53,4,81,2,3

Its fruit is not what a wild fruit is supposed to be. Some trees bear apples 7 or 8 cm across, larger than any other wild apple. 544,3,5 Genome studies find that apple fruit grew in two steps, and that the first came before people. A stretch of DNA linked to bigger fruit was already common in the wild trees. 3,7676,3

Why a wild tree should make so large a fruit is not known. One idea is that it fed big animals, which carried the seeds away. Nobody has yet shown which animals.4,77,76

The botanist Nikolai Vavilov reached Alma-Ata, now Almaty, in 1929, at ripening time. He judged the forests around it a center of origin of the apple.5

Europe had an apple of its own, the crab apple Malus sylvestris: round, yellow-green and 2 to 3 cm across.55 Thousands of apple seeds have come from Stone Age and Bronze Age sites across Europe, tens of thousands from the lake villages of Switzerland alone. 44,23 In Ireland, a store of dried crab-sized apples charred when a Neolithic house burned down.24

None of this shows farming. A wild pip and a garden pip look the same, and where whole fruit survives it is of crab-apple size. 2424

At Ur, in southern Iraq, six apples were cut in half, threaded on a string and dried, then left in a royal tomb.26,27 They are most likely a small wild apple of the Caucasus and Anatolia, and no proof of orchards. Even their date is given two ways, a thousand years apart. 4426

Somehow the big apple of the Tian Shan reached Europe. Its DNA points to the Kazakh side of the mountains, not to the wild apples of Xinjiang, and to a journey west along the trade roads later called the Silk Road. 3,6,83

When is another matter. Genetic papers often say 4,000 to 10,000 years ago, a range borrowed from older writing. There is no sign of farming in the Tian Shan before about 4,500 years ago.3 And the homeland has given archaeologists just one possible apple seed, from the village of Tuzusai, about 400 BCE. 4,284

An apple tree takes years to bear, so there has not been time for the slow change seen in cereals. 8,24 One reading is that nobody bred the apple at all in the usual sense. People moved trees, the trees crossed, and the best seedlings were kept by cloning.4,6

The apple that reached Europe met the crab apple there, and the two crossed. A modern apple's genome is a patchwork of both. 2,3,66

How much is crab apple depends on who is counting, and how: 21% in one study, 25 to 37% in another, about 61% in a third.2,3,6 In 30 of 43 apples sequenced, the DNA passed down the mother's line is the crab apple's.6 One team credits the Asian parent with size and the European one with firmness and flavor.3,6

Other wild apples left less. The Caucasian crab apple's share is weak or cannot be told from the Asian parent's, and the Siberian crab left little mark on mainstream varieties. 22,3,9

Unlike a cereal, the apple lost little variety on the way. It cannot fertilize itself, it breeds slowly, and grafting kept old trees in play. 2,3,792,3

Sow the pips of a good apple and the seedlings will not match it, or each other. 2,6,42,6 The only way to have the same apple twice is to cut a twig from the tree and join it to the roots of another.

The earliest account that can be checked is Greek, from about 424 BCE. Its writer already knew that a grafted tree bears the fruit of the twig, not of the stock. 2929 Theophrastus described sealing the join with bark, mud and hair.29,30

Roman farm books treat it as routine. Cato told his reader when to graft apples.58 Columella and Pliny list apples by name, the Matian, the Scaudian, the honey-apple, and Pliny credits several to the men who first grafted them. 8031 From then on an apple could have a name, because it could outlive its first tree.

Old texts are full of apples that may not be apples. Greek mêlon meant an apple or any tree fruit, and with a word added it meant a quince, a citron or a peach. Latin malum and pomum were as loose. 111212 Homer's orchard of Alcinous has "apple trees", but the word cannot prove the fruit.81,11

English was the same. Old English æppel meant an apple and also fruit in general.13 Related words run through the Germanic, Celtic, Baltic and Slavic languages, and across the Turkic languages the word is alma. 1310

The city of Almaty is often said to be named for it. Vavilov translated Alma-Ata as "father of apples". The reading is disputed. 582

English records name apples early. A Norfolk holding of about the year 1200 owed its rent in Pearmains and Pearmain cider, and in 1292 the fruiterers' bills of Edward I list Poma Costard, at a shilling a hundred. Its sellers gave English the word costermonger. 1414

A name lasts because grafting lasts. The same tree can be kept for centuries, which is why DNA can now find the parents of very old apples.45 A study of 1,425 of them found one old French apple at the center of the web: Reinette Franche, on record by 1540. 4545 It, Margil and the Russian apple Alexander lie behind nearly half the varieties in that study's family tree. 4545

A small tree mattered too. The dwarf "Paradise" apple, first mentioned in print in 1472, was used as a rootstock to keep grafted trees small. 2986

Apples crossed the Atlantic with the first English settlers. Later Boston histories give William Blackstone an orchard there before 1630, and by 1647 apples were being grafted in Virginia. 32,3335 The Roxbury Russet, from Massachusetts, is counted among the oldest American kinds.87,88,89

At the Cape, the Dutch sowed apple pips in 1652 and picked their first two ripe apples ten years later. 3434

Native people took up the tree as well. When the Continental army marched through the Seneca and Cayuga towns in 1779, its reports spoke of apple and peach orchards heavy with fruit. The army destroyed them. 3590

In Chile, Darwin found Valdivia "buried in a wood of apple-trees".38 And China, which had grown soft apples of its own for centuries, first grew the modern kind at Yantai in the late 19th century. 3939

In the early settlement of New York, most farm orchards were seedlings, with only some trees worked over to named kinds.35 A settler in Ohio could be required to plant fifty apple or pear trees within three years to keep his land.40

John Chapman supplied them. An account of 1871 has him in Ohio by 1801 with a horse-load of seed gathered from the cider presses of Pennsylvania, planting nurseries ahead of the settlers. 424242 The same account says he held that seed was the only proper way to raise an apple, and called grafting wickedness.42

So his trees were lotteries. The fruit of a seedling orchard was unpredictable, and much of it fit mainly for cider.40,41 Out of such orchards, now and then, came a seedling worth a name.

About 1809 Mary Ann Brailsford sowed some pips in a cottage garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. One became Bramley's Seedling. The tree is still alive. 1717 In 1811 John McIntosh found a seedling in an overgrown orchard in Upper Canada.43

Granny Smith came up by a creek near Sydney, where Maria Ann Smith had thrown out some rotting apples, by a memory written down in 1924.18 Golden Delicious was a seedling spared by a boy mowing a West Virginia pasture, about 1891 by his own later telling. The nursery that bought it is said to have paid $5,000, or $50. 4646

Nobody chose the parents of these apples. DNA has since found some of them: Golden Delicious is a child of Grimes Golden, and Cox's Orange Pippin of Margil. 45,71,4445 Records were often wrong. Of 119 old parentages checked, DNA confirmed both parents for 79.45

Jesse Hiatt of Peru, Iowa, found a seedling in his orchard, by one account after cutting it down twice. He called its apple Hawkeye. 19,2061 In 1894 the Stark nursery bought the rights and renamed it Delicious.19,20,87

That first apple was heavily striped.19,61 But a branch of an apple tree sometimes mutates, and a twig from it carries the change. Growers found redder branches, Richared in 1919 and Starking in 1921, and grafted from those.20 By 1986 more than 100 strains traced to Hiatt's tree, and it was called the most widely planted apple in the world. 2020

In 1966 it was 36% of the American crop.19 Then it fell. Two accounts blame strains chosen for color that came weeks before the fruit was ready to eat.92,93 In 2018 Gala was forecast to pass it.92

In New Zealand, J. H. Kidd crossed Cox's Orange Pippin with Delicious in 1924. A seedling of that cross, crossed with Golden Delicious, gave Gala. 45,4445,44 In Japan a cross of Ralls Janet with Delicious, made from 1939, was named Fuji in 1962.48

The same few parents came up again and again. A study of 1996 found five founders behind most modern apples: Cox, Golden Delicious, Delicious, Jonathan and McIntosh.7 Of the eight leading American apples, only Granny Smith has none of them in its recorded ancestry.63,45,64,65

Records still went wrong. Honeycrisp, released in 1991, was written down as a cross of Macoun and Honeygold. DNA showed its parents were Keepsake and an unreleased seedling, MN1627, which is probably extinct. 64,6864

The trees changed too. At East Malling in Kent, by 1917, the old dwarfing rootstocks had been sorted and numbered. On the ninth, now M.9, a tree stays half the usual height, and orchards went from about 100 trees a hectare to several thousand. 4795,159697

The world grew 97.9 million metric tons of apples in 2024. China grew 52% of them, up from about 1% in 1961. 161616 Most of the apples planted in China are sports of one variety, Fuji.72

The crop rests on few trees. In the American national collection, over half the varieties belong to one extended family, and Golden Delicious has the most close relatives. 6363 Packing houses hold fruit in low-oxygen stores for months, sometimes a year.98

Variety survives in collections: about 5,000 kinds in the orchards at Geneva, New York, and nearly 2,000 at Brogdale in Kent. 5152

The wild parent is in trouble. Malus sieversii was rated Vulnerable in 2009, with its Kazakh habitat reported down by more than 70% in thirty years. Orchard pollen reaches the forests, and of 463 "wild" trees in one seed bank, DNA found only 212 to be pure. 53,8822 Breeders now go back to those forests for resistance to disease. 53,899,100