Every Apple Is a Clone

I want to begin with a small experiment that will cost you nothing and disappoint you enormously. Take the core of the apple you are about to eat — a good one, a crisp sweet one, a Cox or a Gala or whatever you have — and plant one of its pips. Water it. Wait, with the patience of a saint, for the five to ten years it will take to grow into a tree that fruits. And then taste the apple it gives you.

It will be horrible.

Not always, but very nearly always. It will be sour, or bitter, or woolly, or thin, or simply strange — some small hard green thing bearing no relation whatsoever to the lovely apple whose seed you so hopefully planted. Orchardists have a word for the apples that come up from seed, and the word is spitters, because that is what you do with the first bite. The parent was delicious. The child is a stranger, and usually a disappointing one.

This is the single most extraordinary fact about the apple, and almost nobody who eats one ever learns it: the apple does not breed true. Plant the seed of the finest apple in the world and you will not get that apple. You will get a wild card — a genetic throw of the dice, unpredictable, unrepeatable, and almost certainly not worth eating.

Which raises a question that, once it occurs to you, is quite hard to put down. If apples don’t come true from seed — if every pip is a lottery ticket that mostly loses — then how is it that I can walk into any shop, anywhere, and buy a Gala that tastes exactly like every other Gala I have ever eaten? Where do the named apples come from, the reliable ones, the ones that are the same every single time?

The answer is stranger than the question, and it changes how you look at an orchard forever.

Every named apple variety you have ever eaten is a clone.

I mean that literally, not loosely. Every Granny Smith on earth is a genetic copy of a single tree that a woman named Maria Ann Smith found growing by a creek in Australia in the 1860s, from a chance seedling that sprang up from some discarded Tasmanian crab apples. Every Bramley in every British apple pie descends from one tree grown from a pip planted by a girl called Mary Ann Brailsford in Nottinghamshire around 1809 — a tree which, remarkably, was still alive and still fruiting into the twenty-first century, two centuries on, the Ur-Bramley, the mother of all the millions. Every Cox’s Orange Pippin traces to one seedling raised by a retired brewer named Richard Cox in the 1820s. Every Red Delicious, every Golden Delicious, every McIntosh — each one began as a single freak tree, one lucky roll of the genetic dice, that someone noticed, tasted, and thought: this one. This one is worth keeping.

And the only way to keep it — the only way there has ever been to keep it — is grafting.

Because the seed won’t carry the apple, you cannot reproduce a good apple sexually, through its pips. You have to reproduce it vegetatively: you cut a twig, a little living shoot, off the original tree, and you splice it onto the rootstock of another apple tree, binding the wound so the two grow together into one. The twig keeps growing as itself — genetically, it is the original tree, the same individual, just relocated onto someone else’s roots — and it produces the same apples the parent did, because it is the parent, in every meaningful sense. Do this a thousand times and you have a thousand trees, all bearing identical fruit, all of them, genetically, the same single tree, copied and copied and copied across orchards and countries and centuries.

So when you stand in an apple orchard — a commercial one, row upon row of a single variety — you are not looking at a population of related individuals, a family with its resemblances and its variations. You are looking at one tree, cloned into a thousand bodies. A hall of identical twins stretching to the horizon. Every one of those Galas is the same Gala, the same original New Zealand seedling from the 1930s, wearing a thousand different trunks. The orchard is a stranger thing than it looks. It is less a forest than a very large hall of mirrors.

Once you know this, a lot of apple history suddenly makes a different kind of sense — including the one apple story almost everyone has heard, and almost everyone has wrong.

Johnny Appleseed was a real man, John Chapman, who really did wander the American frontier in the early 1800s planting apple trees across Ohio, Indiana, and beyond. The storybook version has him as a gentle eccentric scattering seeds so that settlers might have sweet apples and pie. But think about what we have just established: apples don’t come true from seed. Chapman was planting seeds, not grafted trees — he had, in fact, a religious objection to grafting, which he considered a kind of violence against the plant — which means that every tree he planted was a wild card, a spitter, a lottery ticket. He was not, could not have been, planting eating apples.

He was planting cider.

The apples that came up from all those random seeds were sour, bitter, tannic things — useless for eating, but perfectly good for fermenting. And on the American frontier, where water was often unsafe and a man wanted a drink, hard cider was the point of an apple tree. Chapman was effectively planting bars across the wilderness. The gentle myth of sweet apples and pie is a later, cleaned-up, more wholesome version; the real John Chapman was supplying the frontier with its alcohol, one patch of random, undrinkably-sour seedlings at a time. There is even a theory that the great American temperance campaign against apple orchards in the early twentieth century — the axing of orchards — was aimed squarely at this, at the orchard-as-drinks-cabinet, which is why so many old cider-apple varieties vanished in that period.

The spitter, in other words, is not a failure of the apple. For most of history, the spitter was the apple. The sweet, crisp, eat-in-the-hand dessert apple is the rare exception, the lucky freak, the one-in-ten-thousand seedling worth cloning — and everything else, the overwhelming majority of what apple seeds produce, went into the barrel.

There is a melancholy corollary to all this, and a quietly heroic one.

Because every variety is a single clonal line, a variety can be lost — truly, finally lost — in a way that a seed-breeding plant never quite can. If the last tree of a given apple dies, and nobody has taken a graft from it, that apple is gone forever. Not endangered. Extinct. You cannot recreate it from seed, because the seed never carried it. The genetic individual that was that apple simply ceases to exist, and no amount of replanting pips will ever bring it back. We have lost thousands of apple varieties this way — the old regional apples, the ones with the wonderful names, the Catshead and the Pitmaston Pineapple and the Cornish Gilliflower and a thousand others, many of them now just names in old nursery catalogues, the trees themselves long dead and ungraffted and irretrievable.

Which is why there exists a small, devoted, slightly obsessive tribe of people — the apple hunters, the pomologists, the orchard detectives — who spend their autumns tramping through abandoned farmsteads and overgrown hedgerows and forgotten gardens, tasting the fruit off ancient untended trees, trying to identify the lost varieties that might, just might, still be clinging on in some neglected corner. When they find one — when a gnarled old survivor in a derelict orchard turns out to be a variety thought extinct for a hundred years — they take a cutting. A twig. And they graft it, and the lost tree lives again, the same individual, resurrected from a single living shoot, brought back from the edge of nonexistence by the same ancient trick that made it reproducible in the first place.

There is something almost unbearably poignant in that. A graft is a piece of the original, unbroken, living line — which means the Bramley tree in a modern orchard is not a descendant of Mary Ann Brailsford’s tree. It is Mary Ann Brailsford’s tree, the literal same living thing, extended across two hundred years by cutting and splicing, a single organism that has outlived everyone who ever tended it and will, if we keep taking cuttings, outlive us too. The apple we think of as a commonplace is actually a kind of immortality — a way for one lucky tree, found once by a creek or in a cottage garden, to go on being itself forever, as long as someone, somewhere, keeps cutting a twig and binding it to new roots.

I think about this, now, every time I eat one. The thing in my hand is not just an apple. It is the latest body of a single individual that was found, once, by a specific person in a specific place — Maria Ann Smith by her creek, Richard Cox in his garden — and judged, by them, to be worth keeping forever. It is a two-hundred-year-old decision, still being honoured, one graft at a time. Every Cox is Mr Cox’s one good tree. Every Bramley is Mary Ann’s. They noticed something the rest of us would have spat out and thrown away — one freak sweet seedling in a world of spitters — and they reached for the knife and the twig and said: this one is worth copying. And so it has been copied, and copied, and copied, down all the years between them and me, into the ordinary extraordinary thing I am about to bite into without a second thought.

The orchard is a hall of immortal twins, each one a two-century-old act of attention, kept alive by a cut.

Go on. Plant the pip anyway. You’ll get a spitter — almost certainly, you’ll get a spitter. But every ten thousand spitters, once in a very long while, there’s the one. That’s how all of them started. Somewhere out there is the next great apple, waiting in a random seed by a creek, for someone with a sharp eye and a sharper knife to come along, taste it, and decide it deserves to live forever.