The Traditional Osage Orange Hedge

March 15, 2024March 17, 2024 / elizapples / 1 Comment

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, I know. Today will be another post not about apples, but with them on the periphery- and that’s probably going to be more of the case moving forward. So, with that, here’s an essay on traditional osage orange hedges – the barriers, the planting and the management.

Background Intro of how I discovered osage orange, comparable to the preamble of a recipe website:
Back in 2016? 2015? I can’t even remember, I went on a wild cider drinking/apple exploring mission from VA to NC to AL and GA with Pete Halupka. We visited all the Southern apple greats, Tom Burford, Lee Calhoun, Joyce Neighbors and Jim Lawson to glean as much wisdom as we could in the realm of fruit exploring, growing and propagating. The unexpected twist of this trip happened when Jim Lawson shared that he had sold thousands of old grafted trees to some brothers in Georgia who planted them all over a small mountain/large hill, and had heard that the lower slopes of this mountain were covered in seedling apples from this original planting. Enamored with the idea of basically finding a 2nd generation Southern apple seed orchard, we set out to find it. And struck out. Turns out, a megachurch bought the property and had long done away with the trees. Feeling rejected, we went to the church’s coffee shop to get a coffee because that was the closest thing to a pick-me-up snack we could find. And that’s when magic happened…

It was probably 1pm and we were the only ones in this coffee shop, so we chatted with the guy behind the counter, who was a youth minister with passion for seemingly two things: coffee and Jesus. We told him our mission to find this wild seedling apple orchard and how we came so far only to discover that it was cut down. He then said: “You know, there’s an old estate near to here that was traditionally known for its peaches and peach brandy, but they might have apples! It’s called Barnsley Gardens. I’ll connect you with my contact there, she goes by the name Fairy Godmother.”

Some due diligence was needed to make sure that going to see the Fairy Godmother wasn’t code for showing up to a Baptist revival, after all we were in a megachurch coffee shop. And after some quick cell phone research, we discovered that Barnsley Gardens contained a different kind of revival… a gothic revival…designed by none other than the young prodigy Andrew Jackson Downing! For those of you who might not know, AJD was a prominent 19th century author, landscape architect and horticulturalist who, with his brother Charles, did much to advance fruit tree culture in the US during his short time on earth. We immediately and excitedly hopped in the car to go meet this Fairy Godmother.

Rather than talk about how much booze the Fairy Godmother fed us once we got there, or her red sparkly kitten healed shoes, or the forest of seedling peaches and ancient muscadine vines, there was another aspect to Barnsley Gardens that is stuck in my mind. Driving through the former estate/now elite vacation destination, one of the roads was lined with very old Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) trees. Loads of them. I’d never seen anything like that before and wondered why someone would plant so many of these trees along a road. Osage orange, or hedge apple, isn’t really something you study much in forestry school, and since they don’t produce commercial crops of fruit, I had never spent much time thinking about them. So, I filed this day and the road lined with osage trees away for years until a new client contacted me wanting to find out how to recreate the traditional living osage-orange hedge. This was my opportunity to do the deep dive, one of my favorite activities.

The American Osage Orange Hedge
When I had been tagged to do this deep dive, I had been living in Northern Virginia for a few years and had acquainted myself with some of the old 18th and early 19th century Quaker farms in the area. Over the years in this area, I noticed that old osage orange trees grew in lines in pastures and in woodlands. I knew, given their other name of hedge apple, that they must have once been part of an old hedgerow/fence system, but the questioned remained: How did farmers turn these trees into hedgerows? And where were they getting their information?

For hundreds of years post colonization (and even today), the goal of many wealthy landowners was/is to have a landscape that mimics the English garden and countryside. One aspect of the English countryside that many people wanted to implement in the 18th and 19th centuries in order to keep livestock in (or out) of their property was that of the thorn-hedge, which was overwhelmingly constructed of English hawthorn in its home country. The problem with using this in the US was that the English hawthorn, an apple cousin, doesn’t like the heat, humidity or fireblight pressure of the Southeastern/Mid-Atlantic climate. When the American hawthorn was tried in its place, people soon found out that when planted densely in a hedge, it would get absolutely hammered by the apple borer. Other thorny plants were tried in its place, such as honeylocust (Jefferson planted juniper with honeylocust and trimmed them to 3 feet tall)- which did not keep pigs out or in, while others trialed trifoliate orange-which never grew tall enough, and the imported buckthorn- which did great in the Northeast (now loathed for how well it did) but underperformed in the South.

It wasn’t until Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) sent osage orange seedlings from the Osage tribe in Missouri to Jefferson (who then gave them to the Landreth Seed Company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) for this tree to slowly start taking root in the East. 30 years later, a young Andrew Jackson Downing, noticing this tree on the grounds of the Landreth Seed Company, soon became it’s greatest champion.

Andrew Jackson Downing: American Hedge-Master
When you start to dig deep into a landscape’s history, you may find relics of horticultural history hiding in plain sight. I now believe that the old osage orange trees growing in lines throughout pastures, woodlands, and alongside old roads are a remnant of Andrew Jackson Downing’s passion for employing this tree as a hedge and getting loads of influential early adopters on board in order to make this tree more accessible/affordable throughout the nursery trade. It has it all. Robust, thorns, vigor, glossy orange-tree like foliage, few insect problems, long-lived, can take a rough and severe pruning, and grows in lots of different soil types. Who wouldn’t get on board?!

In 1847, AJD was the editor of The Horticulturalist, and wrote a chapter on American hedges (volume 1, no. 8). It’s a great read and is also the only thorough explanation I’ve been able to find of how osage (in the South) and buckthorn (in the North) were propagated, planted and cultivated to produce an “everlasting fence.” Everyone who talked about osage hedges referred back to Downing’s work, so it does seem like he was the one to instigate the development of this plant as a hedge.

The large, wizened trees that remain today are the most successful trees in these hedges. Over the last 150+ years, combined with changes in fencing materials and land use, they’ve outcompeted/shaded out their counterparts in order to become single trees in a line. And these are the lucky ones. Though there is no turning back the time on these trees and transitioning them back into a hedgerow (you’d need to plant new trees), their canopies now provide valuable shade to livestock and their hollowed trunks are ecological hideouts for all sorts of critters. The picture below is one of the more visually intact relics of the osage orange hedge for keeping livestock out of the orchard/garden. Most are far more overgrown than this and have lost that first layer. It’s located in Frederick, MD.

The second iteration of Osage Orange Plantings:
About 90 years later, FDR through the Works Progress Administration planted osage orange throughout the Midwest for windbreaks to reduce soil erosion. Millions of them. These were not managed in the same way I’m going to describe below, so if you are in a Midwestern state and have a line of osage, it’s probably best to assume they were planted during this era.

Also, it’s worth being said that many outlets back in the 19th century will complain how osage orange hedgerows to keep out livestock are failing because they were shoddily planted (plants in poor health, spaced too far apart, not cut back) and not managed the way they were meant to be managed. That correct way is what I’m laying out for you below for livestock fencing. It’s crazy to see various photos from permaculture sites showing cartoons of how to grow an osage orange hedge to keep out livestock, and the number of modern media sites referencing these cartoons.

This is historically inaccurate, insanely time consuming, probably won’t work and will cause a lot of bloodshed.

HOW TO DO IT
Osage propagation:
From seed: Fruits should be gathered in the latter half of September. It should then be cleaned and stored in equal parts sand in a cool spot. A quart of sand/seed will usually produce around 5000 plants. Rather than seeding in place in the field, it is recommended that this seed go into a nursery for a year.

From root: Select root pieces that are the thickness of your pinky finger and cut them to be 3-4 inches long, with the top end being a flush cut and the bottom end being a diagonal cut (so you can tell the top from the bottom). Plant these cuttings in your nursery for another year so they turn into seedling trees. Plant the cuttings with the diagonal side down so the flush cut is just below the soil’s surface. These will push out vigorous shoots once the soil warms up enough. It’s easiest to take root cuttings off of new plants that were seeded in the nursery the year before. The root trimmings of 100 new plants in the nursery should produce 1000 root cuttings to plant out into the field.

Prep and Planting Out:
Site prep- In the South, this was usually done in the fall. The final width of this hedge should be 4 feet, so I would first take a subsoiler/single shank and rip your line down to 18 inches if you can. Then go over 6 inches or so and do it again. Then I would cultivate a 4′ swath, with your two ripped lines being in the center, with whatever you might have to break up the soil- tiller, spader- etc and cover crop it. In late winter/early spring (in the South), till the cover crop in again and dig your plants out of the nursery.

Spacing- For the first row, you’ll want to space each plant 1 foot apart within the row. For the second row, offset by 6 inches and then begin planting your trees a foot apart so it looks like this:

Immediately after you plant, while your plants are still dormant, you’re going to cut each plant down to 1 inch (or less) above the soil surface. This is to encourage multiple shoots of regrowth and lots of vigor once the trees break dormancy. You’ll also want to keep this as weed free as you can for the next 2 years in order to target as much vegetative growth as possible. This can be done in a variety of ways, from mulching to herbicide to cultivating.

Pruning Schedule:
One Year after Planting- While still dormant, cut the whole hedge down to 6 inches
Two Years after Planting- While still dormant, cut the regrowth of the hedge down to 18 inches in height (so keep the initial 6 inches from the previous year’s cut, and then cut everything above 1 foot of the most recent year’s growth, leaving 18 inches of total hedge height).
Three Years after Planting- While still dormant, calculate 1 foot of growth from the most recent year and cut everything above it. This will make your hedge a total of 2.5 feet tall, or 30 inches tall.

Repeat cutting 1 foot off the most recent years growth in pruning season until you’ve reached 5 feet in height (should be 5 years after planting). The base of the hedge should now be around 3′ wide and absolutely impenetrable, and the hedge’s width will taper as the height increases. This is where most people stop for cattle, however you can go higher for additional shelter or protection. Some people went as high as 10-12 feet.

When the hedge has achieved its final height and width, you’ll need to shape it 2 times a year with hedge trimmers: Once in June, the second in late September.

Here’s a GIF I made to explain it in picture form:

So did I implement this for the client? The answer is no, unfortunately. A hedge like this, whether in a pasture or elsewhere, needs protection from livestock and deer until the top is above the browse line. So in order to build a hedge like this, you’d need to protect it in the first 6 years with a fence on either side. This could potentially happen more affordably with with electric fencing on either side, but ultimately the deer pressure is so high here that electric fencing may not have worked. Osage orange is in the mulberry family and one of the favorite leaves of deer as is. However, one day I hope to do a small version of these hedges at my house. Can you imagine a 12′ osage orange wall/ deer fence? That’s the dream.

Corsican Chestnuts (part 1): The social and political landscape.

May 17, 2022May 17, 2022 / elizapples / 5 Comments

I’ve wanted to go to Corsica for 15 years and thanks to the Savanna Institute for sending me to Sardinia for the European Agroforestry Conference, I was finally able to visit last week. Many people view Corsica as a vacation destination where you can enjoy the Mediterranean coastlines while drinking incredible wines and indulging in their unique cuisine. However, I’m not all that into beaches, and instead chose to spend time learning about Corsican chestnut (Castanea sativa) culture and the integration of livestock under these ancient chestnut trees. I was planning on writing one essay about the Corsican management of their chestnut trees for food and livestock, but my emotions took over and I ended up learning much more about the social culture and political ecology of Corsican chestnuts, which deserves its own essay. The second essay, soon to come, will surround the aspects of renovating, managing and processing chestnuts in Corsica.

Castagniccia: The Chestnut Region

The first night in the Castagniccia region, in the heart of the Corsican chestnut forest, we talked with an Innkeeper about the surrounding chestnuts, provoking an unexpected story of rural flight from Corsica’s young people. Though some own land in the Castagniccia, most young people have moved to the coast or to mainland France for jobs, only returning for short periods of time- usually only time enough to pick up a small amount of chestnuts in a season. The forests here, she told me, are sick from abandonment, a theme that became amplified as we talked to more people. Because there are no people around to revive these forests, chestnut yields are in decline. Because the trees are yielding fewer nuts, it is becoming harder and harder to harvest them. The prices have ballooned to $8 euros/pound due to the fact that people are now foraging for them in an untended, overgrown forest, rather than harvesting from the abundance of stewarded chestnut forests that once fueled a culture of mountainous people.

As a result of the chestnut shortage and inflated price, chestnuts are being imported from mainland France at less than half the cost. Yet, these imported chestnuts aren’t Corsican chestnuts, as they’ve been selected and bred for fresh consumption. Corsican chestnuts are bred for flour, a dietary staple in Corsican cuisine, and have been selected over hundreds of years for this specific purpose. The mainland France chestnuts thus reduce the quality of products the Corsicans have perfected over hundreds of years.

*Corsican value-added products from local chestnut flour*

The next morning, on a hike into a nearby chestnut forest, it suddenly struck me that I was standing on an 850 year old chestnut terrace system. The Innkeeper was right, the ancient remnant chestnuts were suffering. Feeling the vines tightening their grip, making way for the undergrowth to fill the ever-increasing voids from chestnut die-back, an all too familiar sadness washed over me. No one is here to help the trees. No one is here to take up the responsibility of enlivening the hundreds of years of purposeful breeding and selection and tending. Without human intervention, this ancient ecosystem at the delicate intersection of wild and domesticated, will succumb to the undergrowth.

*Terraces for chestnut harvesting and travel through the forest*

Standing amongst this neglect, I was hit with the futility of my own work and purpose. If Corsica, a culture whose resilient identity is centered around the chestnut, is losing their chestnut forests to abandonment, what hope does the future of tree crops have in the US, whose society refuses to see the value of renovating the incredible trees that already exist? There is little-to-no respect for tending old trees unless they have aesthetic value in well-trafficked areas. Age is viewed as an illness of decline, where planting new is largely favored over investing in the old. My local land grant university has published pamphlets saying that renovating old orchards and plantings don’t make economic sense and they should be cut down and replaced with new trees, without taking ecology into account. They say the trees are vectors for disease and harmful to the new trees that have far fewer natural resistances to the climate. And yet here I am on Corsica, seeking personal inspiration to keep doing the work I love, and witnessing their ancient trees fade away.

Why is this happening here? Why are the chestnut forests in decline? In asking these questions to chestnut growers and producers, I received pieces of answers that together, formed a larger picture. Please note: If anyone reading this is Corsican and has corrections, please contact me through http://www.fruitandfodder.com. I’d love to connect with you.

A BRIEF HISTORY:

Due to its strategic location in the Mediterranean, Corsica has been fraught with invasion for the entirety of its human inhabitation. For five hundred years, leading into the 18th century, the island was somewhat under Genoese rule. While the Genoese occupied the coast, the Corsicans occupied the mountains, where the chestnuts grew wild and abundantly (pollen records show Castanea sativa present in the Neolithic period). Though the Corsicans found fault and corruption in nearly everything the Genoese did, one of the greatest gifts bestowed on the Corsicans was that of improved chestnut cultivars. Specifically, grafting the wild-growing chestnuts over to cultivars that make flour (the big fat grafts of these flour-producing cultivars are still alive today on 800+ year-old trees). It was the ability to make bread from these grafted chestnuts that supported human resiliency on seriously rough terrain. This resiliency also bled into Corsican politics and their fight for independence and autonomy. In the Mid-18th century, Genoa secretly sold Corsica to the French 13 years after the Corsicans had formed their own republic (if you get a chance, listen to this fascinating podcast on Pasquale Paoli). The sale to France led the Corsicans to fight several battles for their independence, eventually succumbing to French rule. To this day, Corsica’s wish for autonomy from France is loud and clear, citing the illegitimate circumstances of their colonization.

The Decline

Despite French rule, Corsicans continued to tend the chestnut forests and produce flour until WWI, when 1 in 12 Corsicans were killed in war, losing the next generation of land stewards. With the massive loss in able-bodied labor, Corsica’s economy went into a recession which caused a mass exodus of the population. After nearly 700 years of forest stewardship for chestnut flour, WWI marks the beginning of decline.

*Corsican chestnut harvest, late 19th century*

Abandonment: Rural Gentrification
After WWII, Corsica became a major vacation destination for the French. Over the years, this has ramped up to the point where the island’s population now swells by four times its size in the summer months. Due to its popularity, many French nationals have bought property on this island, which in turn has caused a drastic rise in real estate values that choke the Corsican’s ability to stay on the land and keep their culture alive. This rural gentrification, which I’m all too familiar with in the US, is one of the larger causes fueling the abandonment of the chestnut forests today.

What does rural gentrification look like? It looks like second homes or land investments owned by, as one Corsican farmer put it, “functionaries.” This was a polite way of saying that these people are very educated in ways that do not include the skills or awareness necessary to steward the precious resources they now own. These “functionaries,” who choose to seasonally inhabit or be absentee to these rural areas, are able to pay much more than those who derive their livelihoods from the land. With rising land costs preventing ownership, there are few options to steward land outside of those closely linked with modern-day feudalism. Of course, lifetime leases are naturally preferable in order to perform the tremendous amount of skilled work needed to restore these forests, yet they are extremely rare. The needed infusion of energy into abandoned land will never come from short-term leases that absentee or unskilled owners widely prefer.

Many of you reading this can relate, as this is not an isolated problem of Corsica. In the United States, a massive transfer of land has happened since the COVID pandemic. This transfer is taking land out of the hands of the capable and into the hands of unaware”functionaries” looking to diversify their wealth investments. With islands being important indicators for their mainland counterparts, it is devastating to witness the Corsicans struggling to gain long-term access to their land, culture and identity.

Without reform, the untended ancient chestnut forests will certainly fade away. Without action in our own countries to curb the ever-growing concerns of neo-feudalism and recover the abandoned past, the multi-generational future of agroforestry feels more like a movement and less like a way of life. Without supporting the long-term access and energy investment in land by able-bodied people, the succession of today’s plantings will succumb to abandonment as well.

I stand in solidarity with the Corsican people. May they gain their autonomy and become a beacon of hope for the rest of us.

The next essay (coming soon): Corsican chestnuts (Part 2): Restoration, care, diversification and flour

Dr. Maxine Thompson: Fruit Explorer, Geneticist, Horticulturalist.

March 29, 2022 / elizapples / Leave a comment

Though Dr. Maxine Thompson died last year, days before Taylor Malone and I were scheduled to interview her for a podcast, a friend sent me her obituary (written by Kim Hummer of the NCGR in Corvallis, Oregon) this week as a reminder of how much of a badass she was. Founder of the USDA ARS clonal genebank repositories, fruit breeder, and fruit explorer. I wanted to share her obituary here.

Dr. Maxine Thompson with her blue honeysuckle, *Lonicera caerulea*

Emeritus Professor Dr. Maxine M. Thompson, Horticulturist, Plant Explorer (1926 – 2021)

Dr. Maxine M. Thompson, world-renowned horticulturist and plant explorer passed away on 1 March 2021. Maxine was born on 3 November 1926, in Bloomington, Illinois. After a few years in Illinois and Minnesota, her family moved to Pasadena, California, where she grew up. She received an Associate of Arts degree from Pasadena Junior College in 1945, and a B.S. in Plant Science in 1948, M.S. in Horticulture (Pomology) in 1951, and Ph.D. in Genetics in 1960, all from the University of California- Davis. Her major professor was Dr. H. P. Olmo, the renowned grape breeder. While in graduate school, she married Harry S. Thompson, a student in the Veterinary College. They had two children, Michael and Laurie.

From 1960 to 1964, Dr. Thompson took a position as a part-time Junior Specialist in the Viticulture Department at the University of California-Davis, while simultaneously caring for her young children as a single parent. In 1964, she accepted a position as Assistant Professor in Biology at Wisconsin State College-Oshkosh, where she taught General Botany, Cytology, and Genetics. In 1965, she moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where she had a series of temporary appointments in the Department of Botany and the Department of Horticulture. She was supervised by Dr. Quentin Zielinski, until his untimely passing. In 1969, she became Assistant Professor of Horticulture, the first woman to be appointed to a tenure track position in that department. Her major research activities involved fruit breeding and genetics of hazelnut and sweet cherry, and floral biology, pollination, fruit set, and cytological studies of fruit and nut species. Her teaching responsibilities included undergraduate classes in General Botany, and Fruit Systematics and graduate classes in Plant Genetics, Pollination, and Fruit set.

During her assignment at Oregon State University, Dr. Thompson was an excellent mentor to graduate students. She provided a friendly face, generous use of laboratory equipment, and helpful advice whenever students visited her fourth floor lab. When students had difficult times, she spoke up for those who had complexities of balancing a professional career while managing a young family.

Dr. Thompson was fascinated with wild and cultivated plant variation. This interest was born in her freshman General Botany class and expanded over many years to her final project, the breeding of blue honeysuckle, Lonicera caerulea L. Dr. Thompson was one of the founding scientists who lobbied for clonal genebanks in the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). Thanks in no small part to her efforts the first clonal genebank was dedicated in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1981. For many years, she participated on the Technical Committees for the National Clonal Germplasm Repository (NCGR) in Corvallis, and the Western Regional Plant Introduction Station, Pullman, Washington.

Her international genetic resources activities began with consultancies with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1982. She was hired to assess under-utilized fruits and nuts in six southeastern Asian countries (India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines). She was assigned to a second consultancy that assessed fruit and nut genetic resources in Pakistan. Her objective was to recommend plant collection expeditions and design a plan for clonal genebanks in that country.

In 1986, she retired from her faculty position at Oregon State to embark on a series of U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsored international plant explorations for fruit and nut genetic resources. Her first trip, in 1987, was a six-month expedition to the mountains of Northern Pakistan, a region adjacent to Central Asia and rich in diversity of fruit and nut species. Next, she accompanied Dr. Calvin Sperling, USDA Plant Explorer, to Central Asia in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan to collect apricots, cherries, peaches, plums, and apples. That same year she and Dr. Jim Ballington traveled to Ecuador to collect Rubus, Vaccinium, and other members of the Ericaceae with potential ornamental value. In 1992, she led an expedition to the southwest of the People’s Republic of China to collect blackberries and raspberries in Guizhou Province. She traveled to Kyrgyzstan, in 1994, to collect walnuts. In 1996, she returned to the People’s Republic of China, this time to the northeast. She led the expedition to collect small fruit germplasm in Jilin and Heilongjian Provinces with collaborators Chad Finn and Joseph Postman. Her final two expeditions occurred in 1998, to eastern Siberia, Russia, and in 2000, to Hokkaido, Japan, to obtain blue honeysuckle. Because of her plant collecting expeditions, Dr. Thompson donated 645 accessions (seeds and plants) to the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS). In 1997, Dr. Thompson was honored with the Crop Science Society’s Frank M. Meyer Medal for Plant Genetic Resources, and, in 2000, with the American Pomological Society’s Wilder Medal.

The high caliper of Dr. Thompson’s science continues to be recognized. Fruit breeders and students of pomology study her Rubus cytogenetics manuscripts as seminal. Her manuscripts on the floral biology and non-dormancy of hazelnut are frequently cited. Her research into incompatibility in hazelnuts provided techniques for standard tests now used by several generations of nut breeders.

In the mid 1970’s, Dr. Thompson and plant pathologist colleague, Dr. H. Ronald Cameron, visited diseased orchards in southwest Washington. They noticed that among the nearly dead ‘DuChilly’ trees were pollinizer trees free of cankers. She made the first crosses with this pollinizer, ‘Gasaway’, in 1976. Recent releases from the OSU hazelnut breeding program carry a single dominant allele from ‘Gasaway’ that confers a high level of resistance to eastern filbert blight. From crosses made by Dr. Thompson, the Oregon State University hazelnut breeding program released four main crop cultivars (‘Willamette,’ ‘Lewis,’ ‘Clark’ and ‘Tonda Pacifica’), four pollinizers with high resistance to eastern filbert blight (VR 4-31, VR 11-27, VR 20-11, and VR 23-18), and one red-leafed ornamental (‘Rosita’). ‘Lewis’ was, for about a decade, the most widely planted cultivar in Oregon, until the release of ‘Yamhill’ and ‘Jefferson’. Growers have eagerly planted the resistant cultivars. Hazelnut orchards in Oregon increased from 29,000 acres in 2009, to more than 80,000 acres in 2021.

Since her final plant collecting expedition in 2000, Dr. Thompson embarked on the breeding of blue honeysuckle, called “Haskappu” in Hokkaido. Over the years, she obtained plant material from Russia and Japan. The Japanese subspecies Lonicera caerulea L. var. emphyllocalyx (Maxim.) Nakaiproved to be the most useful parent because its flowering time suited the climate of the Willamette Valley. She planted thousands of seedlings, and selected improved genotypes. Of these, she released and patented 10 cultivars. She continued this program on her own resources, supplemented with small research grants, but mainly out of her love and devotion to horticulture.

Her fierce independence and sharp scientific mind lead to a remarkable horticultural career. Her work spanned a score of years when our society’s concept of women in the workplace greatly changed. When she began, women, worked hard to be noticed professionally, and were offered lower salaries than were received by male counterparts. Those of us who have come along since then take for granted that our abilities are considered on equal par with other qualified individuals. The meritorious work of Dr. Thompson and others brought about this change. Dr. Maxine M. Thompson, geneticist, horticulturalist, professor, world explorer, and mentor, will continue to inspire generations of horticulturists yet to come.

Maxine requested no memorial service. Please remember her in your heart.

Heart Rot: The bridge between ecology and horticulture

August 23, 2021August 23, 2021 / elizapples / 3 Comments

I’m a lifelong student of pruning. I LOVE learning, observing, and theorizing over tree physiology and applying newfound thoughts and theories with curiosity and gratitude every pruning season. Earlier this week, I saw yet another article talking negatively about heart rot, which motivated me to finally finish my essay on the subject. In this essay I’ll talk positively about heart rot, tree physiology, pruning and orchard ecology.

“That’s heart rot. The tree’s health is in decline” replied one horticulturalist to the above photo. “Hey, that’s heart rot…you had better apply a fungicide spray” replied someone else. And my response? Have you ever pruned an old tree?!

When it comes to pruning, I almost exclusively work with old trees and I see this a lot. Yes, it’s heart rot. No, I do not believe this tree is in imminent danger or even in decline, which is surprisingly a stance that not many people take. And so we’ll start there.

What is heart rot?
Heart rot is what happens when the pith of a tree (the center) starts to decay. The instigators of this core decay are fungi that get into the heartwood through wounds, broken branches, pruning cuts, etc. In a healthy tree, they only stay in the heartwood, which is the part of the tree that is not considered alive. It is often thought of as the dumping grounds for the tree, where minerals and older tree rings go to rest.

As fungi gradually work their way through the heartwood, the tree becomes hollow over time. In the timber realm, these fungi are considered harmful pathogens because they reduce the value of a log. Hollow logs= less money. This way of thinking, that fungi are harmful pathogens and hollow is unsaleable, somehow worked its way into horticulture, only this time… Fungi= harmful, Hollow=structurally unsound/sick/dying. So very rarely have I seen someone in the horticultural realm step back on the subject of heart rot to see the forest for the trees, which is why I’m writing this essay.

*https://www.warnell.uga.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Tree%20Anatomy%20Sapwood%20Heartwood_14-18.pdf*

What is heart rot doing to the tree?
Way back in 2007, when I was doing a lot of forest inventory in Louisiana, I had to core all sorts of trees in order to assess their health and age. Often, after removing the core, I’d get sprayed with stinky water, spurted with methane from the hole I created, or witness a mass evacuation of insects. Lots of life inhabited those trees and that’s because heart rot fungi slowly made way for life to be there. This concept of rot-makes-habitat was really hammered home when I helped a USDA sniper tranq some inbreeding black bears that had chosen to calve in the cavities of old cypress trees. Straight up Winnie-the-Pooh habitat, those cypress swamps. Only poor Winnie was shacking up with his cousin in this scenario and had to move.

*Original illustration of Winnie the Pooh* by A.A. Milne
This tree is a pollarded tree

Fast forward 11 years to 2018, when I flew to Basque France to attend a conference on pollarding. It was there, surrounded by European foresters, forest engineers and horticulturalists, that everyone had a special place in their soul for heart rot and hollow trees, something I had never encountered before. A prevailing opinion, which I now view as a bridge between forest ecology and horticulture, was that heart rot creates hollows/habitats for all sorts of fauna. In hosting this fauna, the trees become collectors of poo (feces, not the bear). This creates an incredible microbial metabolism in the tree which, when combined with decomposing heartwood full of trapped minerals, supplies a steady amount of organic fertilizer that is slowly released to the base of the tree. Since trees store growth rings in the heartwood on an annual basis, this natural process of decomposition and fertilizing is a renewable. Hollow trees provide their own compost. That’s true sustainability.

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But isn’t a hollow tree a weakened tree?
The comparison I always see is that heart rot or hollowing makes the tree structurally unsound. I’m here to tell you that this is mostly an emotional reaction. In all reality (and some physics), the tree isn’t weakened at all until the trunk’s radius is 70% hollow¹.

*Mattheck paper cited at end of this essay*

And keep in mind, that’s an un-pruned forest tree with a full crown. If the tree is pruned to allow for airflow and to correct for weight imbalances, the hollow tree is much more structurally sound. An old pollarded willow tree, for example, boasts complete structural soundness until the trunk’s radius is 93% hollow² thanks to a radically reduced crown . This tells me that mostly hollow orchard trees (on good root systems. Eff dwarfing trees), if pruned regularly, pose very little structural threat.

What causes a hollow tree to ultimately fail?
When trees are hollow and the wind has a strong influence over them (most likely due to crown size and density), the circular trunk becomes a bit oblong. This creates a vertical crack, which is the ultimate shearing stress for the tree. Again, pruning for crown reduction in old trees really helps to avoid the development of these shear cracks.

More explained through tree physiology.
Here’s the deal. Trees contain both sapwood and heartwood (see tree cross section picture at beginning of essay). The sapwood is the outer, living, layer of the tree that is responsible for carrying water and nutrients up to the canopy. Think of it as a bunch of tubes, or vessels (xylem), constituting the lifeline of the tree. Since this is one of the most important parts of the tree, it’s a heavy consumer of photosynthetic energy and a lot of that energy is spent on defense against pathogens (like fungi and bacteria) entering into this important area of transport.

If the sapwood is injured, the tree has an incredible and diverse defense process. One defense in particular that is easy to conceptualize is when tissues (parenchyma) outside of the vessels (xylem) cauterize the wounded vessels and separate them from sound vessels. In Malus, wounded vessels get plugged with a starchy-watery gum that is aptly named “vessel plug.” Other trees have tyloses instead of gum, and when the vessel (xylem) is injured, the parenchyma tissue grows into the cut chamber to seal it off³ .

I’m telling you about vessel plugs only to hammer home the point that sapwood has a lot of defenses that work tirelessly to keep invaders, whether from an accident or from decomposing heartwood, away from their life-transport network. This is part of the reason why maintaining a youthful vigor in a tree is important, because younger wood contains a higher ratio of sapwood to heartwood, increasing the defense capabilities of a tree on a minimal energy budget.

The higher ratio of sapwood to heartwood is also why it is better to prune younger wood on fruit trees. When pruning, the wound is much more efficiently cauterized and uses less energy.

I’ll also note that the ability to cauterize, or create fast boundaries to some sort of attack, is often genetic. Look no further than fireblight tolerance in a durable apple like the Dula Beauty (triploid) compared to the sickly Esopus Spitzenburg to get a better idea of the genetic range.

Pruning larger limbs.
When I consider pruning larger limbs, the rule of thumb for me, unless a giant intervention needs to happen or I’m topworking (grafting in place), is that I often don’t cut limbs larger than 4 inches in diameter. This is strictly something I do in considering the tree’s energy. If the ratio of sapwood to heartwood goes down with age, then it takes a lot more photosynthetic energy (that starch-water mixture) to plug up a larger wound on an apple than it would a smaller wound. Add that energy expense to the tree simultaneously trying to activate dormant buds to create new growth, and even I’m exhausted. Let me be clear, though. I’m not doing this to protect from heart rot, which costs the tree relatively little energy. I’m doing this to help the tree balance its defense and growth energy.

Hollow trees in the orchard: Mycorrhizae
If you believe that hollow trees create their own compost and self-fertilize, and if you believe that pruning trees is a way to make hollow trees more stable, then let’s briefly mention mycorrhizae.

Mycorrhizae is the fungal network that is known to connect trees to other trees and allow them to talk and share resources. They connect trees to other resources by having their hyphae (or the fungal threads of mycorrhizae) grow in and around the tree roots. The roots release sugary exudates, which feed the hyphae and give them energy to go mingle. What causes a tree to release sugary root exudates? Pruning is one way, because tree branches are connected to tree roots. Once you start pruning a tree, the fine root system connected to those branches will die back. It’s not a 1:1 prune: root dieback ratio, as the root system is larger than the crown, but there is for sure some dieback.

What’s more interesting to me, however, is the confluence of fine root dieback from pruning, plant-microbe interactions from a hollowed out trunk and fungal hyphae in the soil. It’s a bit like Captain Planet; when these three powers combine, nutrient uptake and overall ecosystem health are enhanced. And this is why I’m on team ‘hollow tree.’ It’s almost as if the tree is creating it’s own “edge,” or diverse environment in which it and everything around it thrives in a wild and chaotic balance.

Final Comments (for now):

Instead of viewing hollows as condos for pathogens, view them as beneficial habitats that improve your orchard ecology. They are important refuges for all sorts of critters, from insects to birds, microbes to fungi, and maybe even a black bear (just kidding). Given how important these hollows are, NEVER! and I repeat, NEVER! Fill those holes up with concrete or bricks or anything else. Not only does it royally piss me off to ruin a chainsaw chain to some branch that was filled with concrete, but it’s not helping the tree in any way. And would you want to come home one day only to find your house filled with concrete? No.

Let’s keep an open mind to heart rot, ok? It’s performing a pretty amazing ecosystem service with no inputs from me.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!

Citations:

1.) Mattheck, C., Bethge, K., & Tesari, I. (2006). Shear effects on failure of hollow trees. Trees, 20(3), 329–333.

2.) Wessolly L, Erb M (1998) Handbuch der Baumstatik und Baumkontrolle, Patzer Verlag

3.) Bonsen, K. J. M., & Bucher, H. P. (1991). WHAT ARBORISTS HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT VESSEL PLUGS. Arboricultural Journal, 15(1), 13–17.

Know anyone who might want to sell a farm somewhere in the Eastern half of VA. I’m looking. Click here.

I’m trying to buy a farm in VA

August 22, 2021August 22, 2021 / elizapples / 4 Comments

For the last 2 years, I’ve been trying to buy a farm to plant a repository of fruits, nuts and fodder cultivars and I’m still looking. Because of the fact that I really need to find some land soon, I’m writing this blog post to put it out there. Why is this so hard? Here are my thoughts…

1.) Covid and Interest Rates: Many of the city and suburb people seem to be leaving for larger properties now that Covid has them working from home. Combined with low interest rates, these people are buying farms. Not only are they buying farms, but they are waiving inspections and bidding up the price- something I cannot do.

2.) FSA loans. I am completely self employed and though I have great credit and adequate demonstrable farm income to afford a decent mortgage, it’s not enough to get a conventional loan. They ultimately want someone with a W-2. Therefore, my only option is to get a loan through the Farm Service Agency (FSA), an agency within the USDA that exists to make loans to farmers because they know this is a problem. Though on paper this loan looks really sweet- up to 40 year mortgage, low interest, no down payment, it is proving to be a nightmare. Here’s why:

No pre-approvals. The government doesn’t pre-approve, and you must submit your application over and over again for each farm you have a signed contract to buy. Each time, they go over your business plan, your existing finances, the appraisal of the property, etc. Only, no contracts to buy have manifested themselves because I can’t get pre-approved. I cannot find any organizations working on the legislation around this.
90 day minimum discover/financing period. In talking with FSA agents, this is the minimum time needed to process your loan application and give both you and the seller an answer.
County FSA offices. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency is decentralized and broken down into county offices all over. Because my search for land spans several counties, I’ve spoken with FSA loan offices in all of them and they range from being extremely helpful and open minded to down right ignorant and dismissive of my abilities and business plan. It doesn’t help my optimism when articles are also published about how women and minority farmers and ranchers receive disproportionately less credit than their white male counterparts through the FSA.
Business plans. I don’t grow corn and soy. I do, however, have a history of pigs and nursery products and growing/managing orchards. My last conversation with an agent revealed that I probably shouldn’t elaborate on the nursery or orchard part of my business plan because “we don’t understand those businesses” and, instead, should focus on hogs because those numbers are easier. This is incredibly frustrating. So, do I write a largely fake business plan?
You might not get the loan. It takes 45 days to find out if you and your business plan have been approved for the farm. Another 45 days to finance the property.

Having to go through the FSA has turned into one heartbreak after another. After an offer was rejected yesterday, my realtor called to tell me that it’s looking like my only hope is in finding someone who wants to sell but hasn’t listed their property yet. He’s talking with some of his realtor friends to see if they might know of anyone or anything coming up… but that’s what this loan has become. I’ve also written loads of blind letters to landowners asking if they might be interested in selling and the answer, if I get one, is always no. One lady kindly called me back to tell me that a man grows corn and beans on her land and all the land around her and says he’s got a long-term lease. Which is a whole other issue that I won’t get into in this essay, but lease bullying of older women landowners is a real thing.

Other questions you might be asking in your head:

Why not lease? I have a lease and it’s a good one. I trust my business partnership and feel confident in the lease’s longevity. It is, however, simply too small of a piece of land to hold all of the trees I am trying to save, evaluate and give jobs so they’ll stay around and be employed by others.

What about a good lease on more land? It’s a dangerous proposition for me to operate my life’s work on other people’s land. I was interviewed this week by an ag non-profit and they asked me: “On a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being strongest, 10 being least), how much do you identify as a farmer?” I had to answer that in my late 20s, I was a 1 (when I started this blog). That identity combined with non-ownership of my trees and lost access causes a deep and dark depression that I cannot describe and never want to face again. These days, I’m probably a 6 or a 7 simply because of a need for self-preservation. I have clarity and focus and more purpose than ever before and, yet, cannot take anymore risks with land tenure. The next steps have to happen on land that I own. And if that can’t be in the next 6 months, I am going to need to reevaluate everything that feels so solid, which is a crushing proposition.

What about on non-profit land? Putting my work’s canvas in the hands of a board is terrifying to me. I’ve seen boards overturn. I’ve seen them bend to the loudest, most emphatic member. I’ve seen board deals worked behind the back of others on the board, eliminating group conversation. Having my livelihood and passion be in the future of a board would pump me with a never-ending sense of foreboding.

You could put your trees on my property! I get this a lot and, respectfully, I am not interested. I know you are well-intentioned, but it’s spreading myself too thin. It’s not owning the trees. It’s the unknown.

How to move forward?

Well, it seems as if I need to find someone who wants to both sell me a farm and be sympathetic to the FSA loan process, or otherwise offer creative financing. I’m looking for the following:

I’m looking for around 30 acres of land with at least 50% in fields of well drained ag soil in zone 7a, 7b or 8a . But I’d take smaller if I could be on it by this winter.
Within a 150 mile radius of Southeastern VA (Hampton Roads, Middle Peninsula Northern Neck and inland) OR 20-ish minutes off any route between Northern VA and Southeastern VA.
I prefer a house on the property, but it’s not necessary. If no house, on-site electricity and a well with some outbuildings is strongly preferred. Again, at least 13-15 acres needs to be in fields and not forested.
I’m open to offering life estate if someone in advanced retirement wishes to remain in the house, but I need access to the land ASAP.
Old orchards (older than 1980) or former orchard land (pre-1980s) are not preferred due to likely lead-arsenate toxicity in the soil and this is a problem for livestock.
My budget honestly varies depending on the property. Just let me know what you’re willing to sell it for and I can crunch some numbers.
The business plan surrounds producing orchards, nursery space and some livestock. I’m willing to share it with seriously interested parties. I am not interested in business partners for this business plan.

Know anyone who might be interested? I can’t post my personal contact information on here for security purposes, but please email fruitandfodder@gmail.com or submit a message through my website, www.fruitandfodder.com.

I’m open to other suggestions as well, just get in contact with me

Triploid Apples: An adventure into their history, breeding and use

July 31, 2021August 9, 2021 / elizapples / 2 Comments

One of the most important considerations to me when growing apples in the South is if the cultivar has a tolerance to pests and diseases. Called “the final frontier” by my Northern and Western apple growing friends, the Mid-Atlantic and the rest of the US South are notoriously difficult areas to grow domesticated fruit. In true Southern hospitality, our soupy humidity and hot temperatures not only extend a warm embrace to all sorts of pest and disease here, but invite them to stay for a long while and breed.

Despite this high diversity of fungal, bacterial and insect pressure, there are still old apple trees in the landscape that have survived decades upon decades of environmental assault. These trees have been the subject and target of much interest in my network of fruit explorers, as these specimens are proof that it is possible to grow purposeful fruit and trees in this landscape without toxic, self-perpetuating inputs. In past essays, I’ve discussed rootstocks being a factor in this, where larger root systems tended to produce healthier trees. But there are more factors in resilience than just the root system. In today’s essay, which has literally been in my drafts for 3 years, I want to discuss something I’ve been casually studying for years: Polyploidy, or having more than 2 paired sets of chromosomes.

Screen Shot 2019-05-26 at 8.32.23 PM.png

I’ll begin with a bit of history. In the early 1900s, there was a Swedish plant breeder and geneticist named Herman Nilsson-Ehle, who had spent much of his professorial career breeding wheat and oats for high yields in Sweden. He was a huge fan of Gregor Mendel, who had released his findings on inheritance only 8 years prior to Nilsson-Ehle’s birth, and his whole outlook on plant breeding research was a hat tip to Mendel. Mendel, for those of you who may be struggling to remember, was the Monk who stared at pea plants and developed the fundamental laws of inheritance, which we encountered in high school biology as the punnett square .

Before I go any further, I want to give a quick warning. From my research on Nilsson-Ehle, it appears he was a fan of “new Germany,” and saw the genetics research under Hitler’s regime as a means to save the world. In order to only showcase the apple breeding aspect of this man, I’m not going any further in this subject. If you want to read more on his thoughts, which scarily echo modern times, you can go here: Lundell 2016.

In his early research of breeding cereal crops, Nilsson-Ehle would sometimes observe natural mutations in the hundreds of thousands of seeds he planted out for observation. These mutations had much larger, rounder leaves and after poking and prodding these mutants, he discovered their large size was due to having 2 additional sets of chromosomes, or polyploidy (Usually a diploid (2 sets of chromosomes), these plants were now tetraploid (4 sets of chromosomes). These plants exhibited giantism in all ways aside from vigor (which was relatively low). While the leaves and shoots were much thicker than diploids (2 chromosomal pairs), the flowers, fruits and seeds were nearly double in size. This was remarkable to Nilsson-Ehle and prompted him to theorize: If I take this mutant tetraploid and cross it back with its diploid self from the same cultivar, I should get a triploid (3 sets of chromosomes) that brings about enhanced genetics of both!

screen-shot-2021-07-29-at-6.43.41-pm

He was right. The tetraploids he crossed with diploids produced triploids that were more vigorous, hardy and resistant to disease than their diploid or tetraploid counterparts due to enhanced genetic modifiers inherited from the parents of two different ploidy (tetraploid and diploid). This brings me back to fruit exploring in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern US. The large majority of US cultivars known today as being able to tolerate fireblight, apple scab, powdery mildew, and loads of other issues while still persisting in the Southern landscape for decades upon decades are triploids! Including the Dula Beauty, my sturdy family apple cultivar.

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So the US picked up on Nilsson-Ehle’s breeding work and adopted it to their work in the states to breed for hardy, disease resistant apples, right? Nope. WW2 happened and we were already distracted with breeding for scab resistance (more about that in a bit). In 1950, famed berry breeder George Darrow reported on Nilsson-Ehle’s work in an address to the American Horticultural Society. In this address, he mentioned the premise behind Nilsson-Ehle’s work and connected the dots in how this way of thinking has translated into berry breeding for larger, higher quality cultivars. He briefly mentioned apples in this address, reporting that a tetraploid sport (mutant) of McIntosh had been found growing on branches of a normal McIntosh tree in New England, but the mutant branch was only half tetraploid, as the cortex of the wood was diploid (making it a ploidy chimera). He said they were trying to stabilize the McIntosh chimera as a full tetraploid through tissue culture, and I believe they achieved this due to the photo below. This was the end of an interest in sustainable fruit breeding in the US, in my grumpy opinion.

Screen Shot 2019-05-18 at 9.34.40 AM

Come on, Eliza, what about the Liberty apple? Goldrush? RedFree? Prima? [Slight rant/history on apple scab. Skip to below scabby apple pic to avoid]. Sure, there was a breeding effort between selected US land grant universities (PRI= Purdue, Rutgers, Univ. of Illinois) that began in 1926 to create scab resistant apples. They succeeded in doing so in a basic sort of way, which eventually led to the downfall of this research. The style of their research was “monogenic,” or relying on a single gene to control scab resistance in an apple cultivar. There was also a whole lotta inbreeding going on.

The gene identified to have scab resistance is called the “vF gene,” which comes from the cultivar “Malus floribunda 821.” The reason why they picked this gene is because they could identify it in seedlings using molecular markers, so they didn’t have to waste time growing the trees to find out if it was scab susceptible or not. That worked out well enough for a while and they selected some ho-hum cultivars (minus Goldrush, which is awesome but incredibly prone to cedar apple rust) to make available to the public. In 2002, the first reports of scab infection were reported on the scab-resistant apple cultivar ‘Prima.’

In 2011, a German pomologist wrote an article about all of this and, thankfully, it was translated into English shortly thereafter. What he found, looking into the lineage of most US and Euro scab resistant apple cultivars, was a huge amount of inbreeding going on. Not only that, but the cultivars being crossed back to themselves were highly susceptible to scab! I’ll quote directly from the article:

“Today the global fruit breeding industry is producing a wide range of varieties, with one big difference: the overwhelming majority are descendants of just six apple cultivars.

The author’s analysis of five hundred commercial varieties developed since 1920, mainly Central European and American types, shows that most are descended from Golden Delicious, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Jonathan, McIntosh, Red Delicious or James Grieve. This means they have at least one of these apples in their family tree, as a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent…”

Many of the PRI releases have these 6 cultivars crossed multiple times in their lineage. If you do this right and bring out the right traits without problems, it’s called ‘line breeding’. If you end up with problems, it’s called ‘inbreeding’.

The second and main problem with this breeding work, in my opinion, was in our complacency with our selections. We basically ignored any further breeding efforts for scab resistance in order to pursue “Crisp” apples. Takeaway message: FEEL GUILTY ABOUT EATING A HONEYCRISP, COSMICCRISP, CRIMSONCRISP KARDASHIANCRISP ETC. BECAUSE THATS WHAT BREEDING LOOKS LIKE NOW INSTEAD OF BEING ABLE TO GROW APPLES WITHOUT MAJOR INPUTS! Too bad we haven’t been thinking about triploids or even multiple-gene scab control for the last 50 years.

Screen Shot 2019-07-14 at 2.00.30 PM.png

Guess who has? Russia.

Since the early 80s, the All Russian Research Institute of Fruit Crop Breeding (VNIISPK) has continued with the scab resistant vF breeding work that spread across the US and Europe, only it is way more badass. Not only are they breeding for scab resistance, but they’re breeding for tolerance to late frosts, consistent yields without having to thin fruit, COLUMNAR growing habit AND Nilsson-Ehle’s version of triploidy (Speak a little more into my dirty ear, Russia). However, the near-sensationalism of these claims doesn’t stop there. Dr. Evgeny Sedov, the primary researcher in this endeavor (and someone I would really love to interview), closes the abstract of one of his scientific papers that goes into his triploidy research with the following that is so, so Russian:

“It is noted that triploid apple cultivars developed at VNIISPK are inferior to none of the foreign cultivars, based on a complex of commercial traits, and they significantly excel foreign cultivars in adaptability. Our apple cultivars may contribute to the import substitution of fruit production in Russia.”

Some mentioned and additional benefits of triploids (Or reasons to pursue more polyploidy breeding):

Adaptability to climate, disease, stress: In the above quote, Sedov writes how his triploid apple cultivars significantly kick other apple cultivar ass in terms of adaptability. And based on my research covering the last 100 years, he’s not wrong. There have been many observations by the scientific and lay community reporting that triploids end up being more cold hardy, more heat tolerant (the thickness of leaves and fewer, larger stomata give rise to a lower transpiration rate and more water retention that can be used during drought), have better nutrient uptake, and improved resistance to insects and pathogens. The theory for triploids having a higher environmental adaptability has to do with an increased production of secondary metabolites, which enhance plant resistance and tolerance mechanisms (as well as chemical defense).
Thinning: Triploids often have low fertility due to a reproductive barrier of having an extra set of chromosomes- making pollination difficult. Some apple pollen tends to pair decently well with triploid apples to get a decent crop. With most cultivars it isn’t great- just good. This could be seen as a boon to this class of ploidy, but I see it as a good thing. One of the greatest challenges to organic apple production is the thinning process. Most non-organic orchards thin using chemical sprays to knock off flowers or fruits. To this day, many organic spray chemicals either do a lackluster job, or oh-god-that’s-far-too-many-job of thinning the fruitlets off, leaving many orchardists to either thin by hand or accept biennalism (which was a 3 hour conversation at Stump Sprouts one year). If you have healthy pollinator populations, less fruit on the tree will guarantee you a return crop the next year, barring other environmental catastrophes (which you’re better prepared for with triploids, anyways).
Vigor: In the past, I’ve written about vigor on the Elizapples.com blog and how it’s my number one enemy in the Mid-Atlantic given my heavy soils, warm temperatures and ample water supply. Though I need to revisit those essays and condense them into my current evolution of thought, the reason for my past concerns around vigor is that I have conditions that induce [what I’d like to think is] “artificial vigor.” In my climate, this shows up as extreme vegetative growth, which sometimes gives rise to heightened fireblight pressure and other vulnerabilities. Though “artificial vigor” is likely what an incompatibility of growing conditions looks like, I’ve started to differentiate it from what I’m calling “true vigor,” or youthfulness through heterosis/hybrid vigor. This is where triploids shine.
When you start digging in old texts, back before the rise of clonal rootstocks, you might encounter mention of two classes of trees referred to as “Standards” and “Fillers.” The “standards,” often mentioned as Baldwin and Rhode Island Greening (both triploids) were larger trees that took longer to bear fruit. These were thought to be permanent trees, or trees that would be around for generations. The “fillers,” such as Yellow Transparent and Wealthy, produce much smaller trees in the same length of time and were far more precocious in bearing fruit. These trees were thought to be temporary, and were planted in between the “standards” to increase production in the early life of the orchard. An unfortunate modern day “filler” would be HoneyCrisp (diploid). Growing in my climate, it is better termed runtycrisp. Super low vigor, gets loads of diseases, precocious bearer, dies early. Sort of an orchard mercenary. This, to me, is a good way to think about vigor. If you’re growing for the long-term, you’ll want a truly vigorous cultivar that teems with youthful energy, and I believe that youth is heightened as a triploid. If you are growing in areas that are full of pest and disease, it is also not a bad idea to have an extra set of chromosomes to help with defense and stress. Relic trees standing tall in the South tend to be triploid and their presence speaks to their youth and defense: Arkansas black. Fallawater. King David. Leathercoat. Roxbury Russet. Stayman Winesap.

With all of this said, we have a lot of work ahead of us to start thinking about what our breeding programs would look like if we set our targets on low-input, no spray, multi-gene disease tolerance and more. I get it, HoneyCrisp can store for a calendar year in my crisper drawer, but that’s all it has going for it after a year in there.

I am pulling for the expansion of ‘process’ industries such as hard cider, vinegar, juices, syrups, etc to become the targets of agroforestry planning and planting enterprises in the near future. Annual or livestock farmers don’t want to mess with sprays or inputs that are outside of their normal non-tree crops care. If they are going to receive incentives to plant trees on their farms, they will want the ones that need little care and have an economic outlet. This will require a new set of apple cultivars to choose from and they have to come from somewhere…

Here is an incomplete list of confirmed triploid apples. Many of these are from the UK and do so-so in my climate. The ones with asterisks are what I have seen as old relic trees in the Mid-Atlantic:
Arkansas Black*
Ashmeads Kernel*
Baldwin*
Belle De Boskoop
Blenheim Orange
Bramley’s Seedling
Buckingham*
Bulmers Norman
Canadian Reinette
Catshead
Close
Crimson Bramley
Crimson King
Crispin
Dula Beauty*
Fallawater*
Fall Pippin*
Frösåker
Genete Moyle
Golden Reinette von Blenheim
Gravenstein*
Hausmuetterchen
Hurlbut
Husmodersäpple
Jonagold
King David*
King of Tompkins County
Lady Finger
Leathercoat*
Margille
Morgan Sweet*
Mutsu
Orleans Reinette
Paragon*
Red Bietigheimer (Roter Stettiner)
Rhode Island Greening*
Ribston Pippin* (struggles with brown rot)
Roter Eiserapfel (Has 47 chromosomes rather than 51)
Rossvik
Roxbury Russett*
Shoëner Von Boskoop
Spigold
Stäfner Rosenapfel( Has 48 chromosomes)
Stark
Stayman*
Stayman Winesap*
Summer Rambo*
Suntan
Tom Putt
Transcendent Crab
Transparente Blanche
Vilberie
Vixin Crab
White Astrachan*
Winterzitronenapfel
Winter Pearmain
Washington Strawberry

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How to Make Bradford/Callery Pear Less Invasive.

July 16, 2021July 29, 2021 / elizapples / 1 Comment

In my last essay, In Defense of Bradford Pear, I showed the above chart from Australia that correlated fruit size with bird species. Similar charts or descriptions have been found in publications from New Zealand, Spain, Japan and in the US, as well. Based on the correlation of fruit consumption with fruit size, I’ve decided to elaborate on the last essay in order to practically address Callery/Bradford pear invasiveness in the US in the best way I can.

Cedar Waxwing eating *Pyrus calleryana* in winter. Photo from Pilot Online

Due to Callery’s fruit size attracting our native songbirds, like American robins, cedar waxwings and gray catbirds, we can’t stop them from eating the little pears and pooping in marginalized areas like fencelines and worn out pastures. To think we can kill enough Callery pear to make a difference is a lesson in futility because 1.) We live in the United States and you can’t go kill a neighbor’s tree in the name of INVASIVES if they don’t want you to and 2.) Each tree produces thousands of fruits. So, with that said, here are my top solutions to sustainably make Callery pear less invasive and more useful.

1.) Citizen Breeding. What makes Callery pear invasive is its ability to produce copious amounts of small fruits, which birds then eat and distribute all over the place. It seems logical, then, to want to try and breed larger fruits into our populations of Callery in order to stop the spread by birds. In order to reduce invasiveness by around 80%, all it takes is getting progeny from the Callery/Bradford trees to produce fruits that are around an inch (25mm) in diameter. How do we do that? Allow them to hybridize with larger fruiting pears so the seeds dispersed by birds will have a higher likelihood of growing larger fruits…thus halting the invasion cycle.

What is needed to hybridize these pears and get them larger? For starters, you’re going to need a collection of pears that bloom at the same time as Callery, which is quite early. Russian/Cold Climate and early Asian pears are likely your best bet for this, so I went through the GRIN database (taxpayer funded genetic repositories) and have made a starter-list (there are a bunch more):

PI 541904- Seuri Li
PI 45845- Yaguang Li
PI 437051- Jubilee (cold hardy)
PI 541925- Kor 2
PI 267863- Pingo Li
PI 134606- Tioma (cold hardy)
PI 278727- La Providence
PI 278731- Sivaganga Estate
PI 307497- Seu Ri
PI 292377- Ranniaia Mleevskaia (cold hardy)
PI 541760- Chieh li x Japanese Golden Russet
PI 278729- Samy’s Estate
PI 541761- Chieh Li x Japanese Golden Russet 2
PI 541905- Szumi
PI 127715- Krylov (cold hardy)
PI 541326- Angelica Di Saonara
PI 324028- B-52 (cold hardy)
PI 541290- Mag 1 (cold hardy)
PI 132103- Shu Li
PI 312509- Tse Li

Appreciate this list? Help fund this type of work and more by purchasing charcuterie from www.hogtree.com.

You can request free scions online from September 1 to February 1 of every year from GRIN. You can also probably buy many of these cultivars online. From there, I highly recommend you share scions of these for free every winter, as I plan to do, in order to help infuse larger fruiting genetics into Calleryana.

You might notice there are a bunch of Asian pears in that list and you might think: Eliza, those pears are super fireblight susceptible! And you are right, of course, but think of it this way: MANY trees that are listed as fireblight susceptible are actually quite tolerant to FB once they are established and reaching sexual maturity. With Callery being an amazingly fireblight tolerant rootstock, this should help to get your topworked trees past the first 2 years of heightened susceptibility so they can start to fruit. Once these Asian pears intermingle with Callery, there are two possible outcomes:

1.) The hybrid offspring are more fireblight tolerant than the grafted Asian pearent’s tolerance

2.) The hybrid offspring is less tolerant to fireblight than the grafted Asian parent’s tolerance and will probably succumb to the disease and die on its own.

Either are a win-win, really.

Next, you’re gonna need to go into your pear thicket and do some cutting and grafting. There are two scenarios I see often:

1.) Field full of Callery: If you have a thick field of calleryana, I would recommend getting a forestry mulcher in and cut/mulch rows into the existing Callery stand. Then, run the mulcher to cut out trees within the rows left standing so the remaining are at 15 foot spacings. Top the trees you’ve left behind above deer browse ( throw into the alley and run over those, too, with the mulcher) and graft on the early blooming large fruited cultivars.

2.) Fenceline/Border with Callery: This is the scenario We’ve been dealing with over the past few years along the farm fenceline. First thing I do is flag the trees I want to keep, which are at 15 foot spacings along the fence. Then we cut out and chip all the non-flagged callery trees using my neighbor’s chipper (I mulch my orchard with callery pear wood chips). While we are cutting out the non-flagged trees, I go ahead and also cut the tops out of the flagged trees. I pick a height that is above deer browse height and also has a lot of clear wood without branches, because that helps with grafting. In April (I’m in zone 7a), I make fresh cuts on the remaining pear trees and topwork all of them to fruiting cultivars. We’ve been doing this for 3 years and 2018’s topworked pears will be producing fruit this year.

Topworked fenceline callery pear to a local french heirloom cultivar. This was grafted in April of 2021. This is a smaller tree. I’ve topworked 7″ trees as well with amazing take.

This is totally doable and the result? An orchard of pears! You’d have to cut the tree down anyway if you were going to spray it, so why not turn it into a producing pear tree of value? My neighbors even pitched in to help us cut and chip in the name of supporting my vision and also getting rid of the fruiting portion of the Callery trees.

In two years, your top-worked pears will be flowering and the bees will mingle between surrounding landscape Callery/Bradford pears that weren’t able to be cut down and the large-fruited cultivars you have grafted. With callery pears being pollinated with the list of pears above, your chances of getting larger fruit to come up from the fertilized seed will exponentially increase, limiting its invasiveness if the fruit is an inch or larger in diameter.

2.) Use them as rootstocks! Every Callery pear growing is automatically the best pear rootstock around. For all of you people out there who are inundated with deer pressure, graft to the Callery pears to any pear you’d like (or Winter Banana apple) above the deer browse line. Sure, you’ll get lots of leafy re-growth off the trunk for a few years (which the deer or other livestock eat as tender shoots), but its also really easy to remove new growth with your hands or slightly older growth with pruners, and new shoots don’t have thorns. You’ll start to get fruit in 2-3 years.

One of the main reasons why Callery didn’t catch on as a rootstock, aside from root propagation failures and hardiness, is that they don’t produce dessert fruit (fruit meant for out of hand eating). This is the same reason why we’ve lost SO MANY fruit cultivars in the last 100 years. If you weren’t a dessert cultivar chosen by the cooperative extension to be grown in the early 20th century, you were phased out. However, in today’s markets, I believe large fruited Callery pear hybrids really have a chance in fermentation, specifically cider blends and perry (cider made from pears). They are high in sugar (over 16% brix on average for the 200 or so hybridized trees I’ve evaluated), and run the gamut in acidity, tannins, aromatics and unusual characteristics. Since these trees are so disease and pest tolerant, which allows them to grow and produce copious amounts of fruit without the hand of humans or chemicals, they stand to produce the most sustainable fruits and alcohol in humid temperate climates. We need more people working with them in order to make this happen because they aren’t apples and they need their own methods.

If you’d like to see more essays in general (I literally have 75 in draft form and many more in my brain), my time will need to be supported. You can do this through the donate button above or buy my company’s charcuterie from HogTree

The last essay left me with a bunch of hate mail and loads of baseless claims. In future essays, I’ll be debunking many of these claims in order to try and bring about a full picture. With that said, please send your strong opinions to fruitandfodder@gmail.com

Of Note: throughout the South and Southern New England, I have been noticing spontaneous hybridization in the “wild” between P. calleryana with P. communis (French) and/or P. pyrifolia (Asian). These trees have much larger fruits, usually golfball sized or larger, and are often loaded with fruits dripping from the trees because Callery genetics are heavy lateral bearers (perhaps an indicator phenotype for these hybrids). No research that I can find has evaluated the genetics of these larger fruited callery-like pears to see what exactly they are crossed with, but I’m happy to help supply specimens if anyone out there takes an interest.

In Defense of Bradford Pear

March 29, 2021August 10, 2021 / elizapples / 2 Comments

I wrote this article for TheFruitExplorers.com and decided to cross post it here.

Every year, around this time, social media begins to rumble in uproar over Bradford Pear (Pyrus calleryana). With headlines like “The Curse of the Bradford Pear,” “Bradford pear tree: How the trees can hurt people, then environment,” and finally “I Just Hate Bradford Pear,” it’s no wonder people have it out for them. The trees have NO GOOD PRESS and, unfortunately, it’s much easier for hoards of people to fall in line with anti-invasive rhetoric than to understand who or what they are trying to demonize. In light of this, the time has come to take a stand for this poorly misunderstood tree.

Bradford pear belongs to the species Pyrus calleryana, which is why it is sometimes called “Callery.” This species of pear is native to China, where the range goes from sea-level to 5000 feet in elevation, spanning a thousand miles inland as the crow flies. Cousins of callery pear are also in Northern Korea and Japan, showing an immense climate and site adaptability for the species.

How did it get to the US?:

In the early 20th century, the Pacific Northwest contained many orchards of Pyrus communis, or French pears. These pears were being ravaged by fireblight (Erwinia amylovora), a native bacterial disease, and professor Frank Reimer was pulling his hair out over the potential loss of the West Coast commercial pear industry if a control for fireblight wasn’t found soon. Researchers have long known that Asia’s gene pool for fruit and nuts is much older than European or American genetics, and likely hold resistances or much improved tolerances to pest and disease due to the long and slow co-evolution over time. Reimer knew, from his research, that Pyrus calleryana and Pyrus ussuriensis were inherently resistant, so he put out an SOS to obtain pear seed from Asian regions in order to hopefully find resistance.

Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts answered his call in 1908, sending plant explorer EH Wilson (aka “Chinese” Wilson) to China to see what he could find. Once there, he collected P. calleryana seeds from 4,000-5,000 feet in elevation and sent them to be grown out in Boston. Many of these proved to be hardy for Massachusetts and many people, including professor Frank Reimer, got excited. Given the potential for Pyrus callerana to save the commercial pear industry in the PNW, the USDA decided to add callery pear to their fruit’s explorer’s collection list.

At the time, the USDA had been going through a period of glitz and glam concerning their plant exploration program. The golden child at the center of this hubub was the darling plant explorer David Fairchild, the person responsible for bringing over German hops, the avocado, and kale (among many, many other things). With his notoriety and prestige, he married into the fabulously wealthy family of Alexander Graham Bell, and was feeling the need to step down from his travels abroad in order to start a family. Instead of Fairchild himself going on the pear mission, he delegated the job to one of the toughest mofos alive: Frank Meyer. Dutch born, Meyer was known for his ability to walk 30+ miles a day, everyday, forever.

This would be no small job, either. According to Arnold Arboretum, 25 pounds of seed would require picking seeds out of 5000 pounds of fruit. That’s the equivalent of 125 bushels of tiny (8.5mm on average) callery pear fruits, which would be maddening to collect by hand. This wasn’t a problem for Meyer, though, as he probably preferred tiny pear seeds to interacting with people. With his marching orders, he set out on this pear mission, writing the following to his boss, David Fairchild:

A letter to David Fairchild from Frank Meyer April 16, 1917

Once the first batches of seeds were back in the States, they went under commercial pear rootstock monitoring for fireblight resistance. These pear seeds produced vigorous, uniform trees that, when inoculated with fireblight, proved to be the most resistant of any pear tree they had evaluated, by a landslide (double the resistance of Pyrus ussurriensis and far more vigorous). The chart below reveals the results of this trial:

Fireblight Results Callery Pear Innoculation.png

In later studies, Reimer reported that 11% of P. calleryana trunk inoculations showed a severe fireblight infection. Which, by the way, is pretty amazing. When I innoculated my apple seedlings with fireblight ooze, 95% of them showed severe infection or died.

In addition to having stellar fireblight resistance, Callery pears were tested on a variety of sites and were found to thrive in nearly all soil and moisture scenarios, from coarse sand underlain by granite to heavy clay. They also found Callery pears to have a lower chilling requirement than P. communis (French pear rootstock) (source), allowing for it to be grown in more erratic seasonal conditions (which might not have been a big deal then but MAN is that a big deal now). This pear species was seen as the most bomb-proof, resilient rootstock around on which to grow our favorite eating pears, and even produced yields 32% above the same cultivars grafted to P. communis (Source: Westwood, Pear Rootstocks for the Northwest. NAFEX POMONA Vol 3, Number 2, 1970). With the excitement and growing popularity of using callery pear as rootstock, the US continued with seed gathering trips to China for decades.

From Amazing to Pariah, what happened?

First of all, most of what you read about the introduction of Bradford pear (P. calleryana) to America is incorrect, as I’ve just given you the real history above. Outlets like The Grumpy Gardner, a now-retired columnist for all things horticulture at Southern Living Magazine, have done a lot of damage spewing emotion-based information to people who don’t know any better. With little challenge to any of the points ever made, he and others managed to create a culture of emotional reaction surrounding P. calleryana, rather than a much needed practical one. For the record, the chances of you being allergic to Bradford Pears are slim to none because they aren’t wind pollinated. Bullied, bruised, blamed and constantly soaked in toxic agri-chemicals to try and kill it, the Callery pear is one of the most shamed species in the US. If you don’t believe me, look no further than the hundreds of online articles that alone focus on how the blooms smells like male ejaculate (that’s spermadine and putresine you’re smelling and it’s in a lot more plants than you think, including the beloved American chestnut).

Why didn’t Callery become the main rootstock of all pear production in the US? According to Reimer, on average, the tree isn’t very hardy (doesn’t like to grow colder than 7a, or below -10 fahrenheit), it doesn’t propagate all that well from stooling beds (primary means of producing rootstocks in the nursery industry), and has poor fruit qualilty. Why fruit quality matters for a rootstock is beyond me, but it was listed as a reason. In regions 7a and hotter, though, Callery pear is the best rootstock onto which one could graft European and Asian pear cultivars, but the research conducted on these pears was West coast centric and never really made it over to the East, even after Callery became a dreaded invasive.

Root Stock to Ornamental to Monster:

The Glenn Dale Maryland USDA research site had planted many P. calleryana seeds from Frank Meyer’s collection and by 1950, there were still a few P. calleryana trees remaining at the location. In 1952, researchers took notice of one particular thornless (many wild apples and pears have thorns) tree with an amazing white bloom (Callery produces fruit on lateral branches, on the previous year’s wood and on spurs of older wood. According to Reimer, It probably produces more blossoms than any other species of Pyrus). Thinking this could be of ornamental quality, cuttings were taken from this tree, grafted onto a seedling Callery pear rootstock, and planted in a subdivision nearby for testing. These trees were pruned/maintained, and after 8 years of oohs and ahhhs, they named the cultivar ‘Bradford,’ in honor of the horticulturalist who recognized its potential as an ornamental tree. By 1962, the Bradford Pear was available commercially and it became one of the most widely planted suburban trees in the US.

Around this time, other research stations and arboretums were noticing the ornamental value of the seeds planted from Meyer’s explorations. The National Arboretum produced, from a seedling selection, a cultivar called “White House,” and a seedling now known as “Autumn Blaze” was selected from the Horticultural Farm in Corvalis, Oregon.

The late 1960’s welcomed a gold-rush era of Callery pears, with many nurseries planting out seedlings from the original collections of Frank Meyer in order to find the next Bradford. This, friends, is where we start to transition from Amazing Rootstock to Amazing Ornamental Street Tree to “The Curse of the Bradford Pear.”

Pyrus calleryana is amazing for all of the reasons I listed above (insect and disease resistance, able to grow in a variety of soils and climates), but did you know it is also largely resistant to pest like deer, Japanese beetles, and wood boring beetles? The tree is precocious (often 3 years to fruit), the first to leaf out in the spring and the last to drop its leaves in the fall/winter. All of these qualities are noteworthy, yet have gone largely unnoticed due to one thing: The original ‘Bradford’ tree was self sterile.

When a tree is self-sterile, it cannot reproduce with itself in order to create progeny (fruit with viable seed). This wasn’t a problem when Bradford clones were planted out in the DC suburbs, because they were all genetically identical. When the bees would visit the flowers of one tree, and then the next, the pollen was sterile and did nothing to further fruit development. However, that was just one cultivar’s genes.

Remember when I said that Meyer walked 30+ miles a day? He covered so much ground while in China that he sent seed from Callery pear populations hundreds of miles apart. As it turns out, these populations produce genetically distinct cultivars under the species, and are totally able to cross with one another. Which they did once all those populations were brought together to intermingle in the US.

When the other ornamental selections like “White House” and “Autumn Blaze” showed up on the streets, the self-sterile Bradford pears soon became promiscuous in the neighborhood. By 1980, 300,000 Callery pear trees had been planted as street trees, producing huge amounts of small fruit with viable seed. From there, seedlings spread far and wide via birds and raccoons.

Today, in certain areas of the US, Callery pear seedlings can be found inhabiting fence-lines and ecologically stressed out pastures/roadsides, causing everyone to scream INVASIVE! THEY’RE INVASIVE! OMG KILL THEM. I CAN’T EVEN THINK STRAIGHT RIGHT NOW. EWWWW. IS THAT SPERM I SMELL? KILL.

But let’s take it out of all caps for a moment and go a bit deeper, because they deserve a chance.

Why is it so successful in the landscape?

Look, when you get into research about exotic plant species in the US, a huge majority of papers are biased in their research scope to focus on their invasiveness rather than what they offer. For instance, this paper (and there are many like this) decided to go ahead and only name one bird, the invasive European Starling, as being responsible for spreading callery pear in the landscape.

Screen Shot 2021-03-29 at 10.51.48 AM.png

This is a type of fear mongering that I find over and over again. Rather than list the native birds that actually feed on Callery pear (there are MANY), research tends to dwell on the negative ones in order to further demonize this tree. I’ve been writing this paper for nearly 3 years (because 2 editions of this have been deleted on accident) and the only research I have been able to find listing native birds comes out of non-profit research and a masters thesis from Michigan, both BURIED in google. Over time and with much frustration given the extreme biases of US research, I decided to broaden my search for Callery pear dispersal in other countries, and the following is what I found out of Australia:

Size of fruit matters given the diversity of birds.

As you can see from the diagram above, the size of fruit directly corresponds with the number of frugivorous bird species that eat them. Like most ornamental fruit trees, Callery pear’s small fruit (8.5mm on average) is relished by birds, especially since they often have a tendency to hang on the tree well into winter- providing some much needed winter food for the birds that stick around.

Ok, so lets briefly put this all together: Ornamental= small fruit= bird food= birds poop= up comes Callery pear= produces thorns so not browsed= very tolerant of all the diseases= very tolerant of any soil type= it grows and thrives. But also, the Southeast is seriously just like China’s native range for Callery Pear (dark grey)…

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232682928_The_Beginning_of_a_New_Invasive_Plant_A_History_of_the_Ornamental_Callery_Pear_in_the_United_States

I have two trains of thought that I’d like to go down: Fruit size and human impact on the land

1.) Fruit size: The average untamed fenceline in my climate contains autumn olive, barberry, multiflora rose, Callery pear, oriental bittersweet, honeysuckle, greenbriar, flowering dogwood, privet, american holly, hackberry, black cherry and a growing number of ailanthus. With exception to Ailanthus (which has a winged seed), what do all of these species have in common? They all produce fruits less than 15mm in size. Whenever there is a perch, such as a fenceline or a powerline, you’ll often see these species because they have small fruits that birds eat. The reason why we see so many Callery pear along these areas as well as in old fields and the built environment leads me towards the second thought…

2.) Human impact on land. Unlike many of the other species I mentioned in the paragraph above, Callery pear can thrive in compacted, low nutrient, poor draining soil with blazing sun and oppressive humidity. The reason why we see so much of it is because it thrives where humans have arrived and destroyed. Places like old fields, for example, which are are nutrient poor and compacted due to the robber-farmer that took more than the field could supply. Often in my area, those fields once supported tobacco and now are hayed by good-ole boy farmers in the area to keep the property in ag taxation for the owner, but no one ever puts any love/nutrition back into the land. What will grow in this scenario? Callery.

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How can we make these pears less invasive?

Due to Callery’s fruit size attracting a high diversity of fruit eating birds, we can’t stop birds from eating the little pears and pooping in marginalized areas like fencelines and worn out pastures. To think we can kill enough Callery pear to make a difference is a lesson in futility because 1.) We live in the United States and you can’t go kill a neighbor’s tree in the name of INVASIVES if they don’t want you to and 2.) Each tree produces thousands of fruits. So, with that said, here are my top solutions to sustainably make Callery pear less invasive and more useful.

1.) Citizen Breeding. What makes Callery pear invasive is its ability to produce copious amounts of small fruits, which birds then eat and distribute all over the place. It seems logical, then, to want to try and breed larger fruits into our populations of Callery in order to stop the spread by birds. In order to reduce invasiveness by around 80%, all it takes is getting these trees to produce fruits that are around an inch (25mm) in diameter. Throughout the South and Southern New England, this is happening already in the “wild.” I’ve noticed trees that strongly look to be be hybrids of P. calleryana with P. communis (French) and/or P. pyrifolia (Asian). These trees have much larger fruits, usually golfball sized or larger and are often loaded with fruits dripping from the trees due to callery’s lateral bearing genetics (a possible phenotype identifier for callery hybrids). No research that I can find has evaluated the genetics of these larger fruited callery-like pears to see what exactly they are hybridized with, but I’m happy to help supply specimens if anyone out there takes an interest.

What is needed to hybridize these pears and get them larger? For starters, you’re going to need a collection of pears that bloom at the same time as Callery, which is quite early. Russian/Cold Climate and early Asian pears are likely your best bet for this, so I went through the GRIN database and have made a starter-list (there are a bunch more):

Appreciate this list? Help fund this type of work and more by purchasing charcuterie from www.hogtree.com.

You can request scions online from September 1 to February 1, of every year from GRIN. You can also probably buy many of these cultivars online. From there, I highly recommend you share scions of these for free every winter, as I plan to do, in order to help infuse larger fruiting genetics into Calleryana.

1.) The hybrid offspring are more fireblight tolerant than the grafted Asian pearent’s tolerance

2.) The hybrid offspring is less tolerant to fireblight than the grafted Asian parent’s tolerance and will probably succumb to the disease and die on its own.

Either are a win-win, really.

Next, you’re gonna need to go into your pear thicket and do some cutting and grafting. There are two scenarios I see often:

This is totally doable and the result? An orchard of pears! You’d have to cut the tree down anyway if you were going to spray it, so why not turn it into a producing pear tree of value? My neighbors even pitched in to help us cut and chip in the name of supporting my vision and also getting rid of the fruiting portion of the Callery trees.

In 2-3 years, your top-worked pears will be flowering and that’s all part of your plan, as bees will mingle between surrounding Callery and the large-fruited cultivars you grafted. All of a sudden, your chances of getting larger fruit to come up from that fertilized seed will exponentially increase. And did I mention that you’ve also made yourself an orchard?

One of the main reasons why Callery didn’t catch on as a rootstock, aside from root propagation failures and hardiness, is that they don’t produce dessert fruit (fruit meant for out of hand eating). This is the same reason why we’ve lost SO MANY fruit cultivars in the last 100 years. If you weren’t a dessert cultivar chosen by the cooperative extension to be grown in the early 20th century, you were phased out. However, in today’s markets, large fruited Callery pear hybrids really have a chance in fermentation, specifically cider blends and perry (cider made from pears). They are high in sugar (over 16% brix on average for the 200 or so hybridized trees I’ve evaluated), and run the gamut in acidity, tannins, aromatics and unusual characteristics. Since these trees are so disease and pest tolerant, which allows them to grow and produce copious amounts of fruit without the hand of humans or chemicals, they stand to produce the most sustainable fruits and alcohol in the South. We need more people working with them in order to make this happen because they aren’t apples and they need their own methods.

Orchards and Slavery on the Rappahannock

June 30, 2020June 30, 2020 / elizapples / Leave a comment

I’ve been looking for established connections like this ever since I started to see the connection between old silk trees and the enslaved people who cultivated them.

American Orchard

Between May 13 and May 23, 2013, I co-taught a study tour of Civil War battlefields with a colleague. While this was the sixth time I have offered this study tour for undergraduate students, I decided at the outset that I would use this opportunity to gather information about orchards on Civil War battlefields. I was aware of the “famous” peach orchard where many men died on the field at Gettysburg, and was aware of a few other references to battlefield orchards, but was surprised at the abundance of information I uncovered on the eleven day trip. This is the second in a series of blog posts on battlefield orchards.

Chatham Manor today. Before the Civil War, this was the back of the house, with the front yard overlooking the Rappahannock.

Chatham Manor sits on the north bank of the Rappahannock River, on a high bluff overlooking the City of…

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The Passing of C. Lee Calhoun: Southern Apple Hunter

February 22, 2020February 28, 2020 / elizapples / 11 Comments

It is with a heavy heart to report the passing of C. Lee Calhoun, Southern apple hunter.

Lee Calhoun at Horne Creek Historical Farm

In March of 2009, while living on an un-bridged island in Maine, I was struck by an instant and permanent passion for apples. When I came out to my family that I wanted to be an apple orchardist, my Grandmother wrote me back and said: Did you know that we have a family apple? Your great-great-great-grandfather, JA Dula, whom you are doubly related, was a famous North Carolina orchardist of his era. Our apple is called the Dula Beauty.

Immediately after reading this, I googled “Dula Beauty” and the only descriptor I could find was a snippet from the Book “Old Southern Apples,” by Creighton Lee Calhoun. I was too poor to buy the book at the time, so I found Lee’s phone number and gave him a call for the full description. He answered, asked me to give him a moment to pull out his notes, and started to tell me everything he knew about the Dula Beauty apple and where I could find it.
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Lee graduated from NC State with a degree in agronomy and plans to become a plant breeder, but the Korean war had different plans for him and he joined the army soon after graduation. Though the army soon made a career man out of him, he couldn’t shake his passions to get back to farming. The day he retired, he bought a chainsaw and started clearing a site for a house and orchard in Pittsboro, NC.

Once his Japanese-style house was built, he shared with his elderly neighbor that he wanted to plant a few apple trees. This conversation sparked the neighbor to share with him that he had once had a Magnum Bonum apple growing in his childhood home, and he’d sure love to find another to plant at his house. Finding the Magnum Bonum was the sort of challenge that got Lee’s wheels turning. How many old apple cultivars were still out there? Little did he know at the time, the tradition of Southerners growing apples was quickly disappearing from the landscape and he had been tagged to help keep it alive.

Apples were once grafted onto seedlings or roots as a means of propagation, which gave them a lifespan of around 100 years in the South if the vines were kept out of the trees. In the 70s, Lee realized these trees were aging out, as were the people who knew the names and stories of these trees and the window to find them was quickly closing. From there, he and his wife, Edith, devised a plan to go find what they could: They would buy ads in the rural electric cooperative newspapers across the South and see what people knew of the old apples in their landscape.

This plan worked. Soon, Lee and Edith were getting calls and letters from all over the place with apple names they’d never heard of like “Notty P,” “Crow’s Egg,” and Early Joe.” Excited for the adventure and exploration, they hopped in the truck and took off. As they gained more fruit exploring experience, they developed more parameters for apple hunting which they called “signs of elderly people.” If there was an apple tree, a clothes line with laundry hanging on it, and an old car somewhere on the property, they would stop and knock on the door. Lee told stories of pulling into these driveways to find an elderly man skinning a muskrat on the porch, or a man whittling a wooden duck for his great-grandson which he planned to give him on his 100th birthday, which was only 3 days away.

My favorite Calhoun cold knock story came when I asked him if he knew of any apple varieties that were used to feed hogs. He snorted and then he told me about the time when he pulled into a driveway next to a doughnut factory. The man who answered the door said he’d gladly take Lee to the tree in the backyard, and grabbed a large stick on his way out the door to keep the pigs back, because the apple tree was located in a pig paddock. When looking at the tree, Lee asked if the pork was good from eating all of these apples. The man smirked and hollered in to his wife to make a couple ham biscuits for Lee. Once back to the house, Lee sunk his teeth into the ham biscuit and it was the best he ever had. “This is what apple fed pork tastes like?!” He questioned/exclaimed. “Nope,” the old man replied. “That’s what doughnut fed pork tastes like.”

It took Lee and Edith two years to find the Magnum Bonum that his elderly neighbor first mentioned from his childhood. With each find, each letter, each phone call, a world of apples unfolded. Through the grapevine, he was finding other people who were also looking for and propagating these apples. People like Joyce Neighbors of Alabama, Jim Lawson of Georgia and Tom Burford of Virginia. People catching on to Lee and Edith’s work were contacting Lee wanting to take part in the hunt, too. Soon, Lee and Edith had a network and a lifeblood to go rescue these lost apple cultivars from the throws of nature and human development/axe. Over that decade, Lee and Edith had acquired nearly 400 apple cultivars from across the South. They grafted these trees to dwarfing rootstock and started one of the first high density apple orchards in the South, if only to hold their large repository in a small space. They also started a fruit tree nursery where they custom grafted these apple varieties from their home, located on Black Twig Road.

In the 90s, Lee and Edith wrote the book “Old Southern Apples” cataloging all of the apples they found and all of the apple cultivars they believe to be threatened or extinct. I never got to know Edith, as she had died of pancreatic cancer a few years before I found Lee. However, Lee would never start a story about the book without telling me that Edith wrote that book. She typed the whole thing. Edited it. Gave insights to Lee on what to say. He would also tell me that she could bake an apple pie in her sleep, as she had to try each and every apple in their orchard in pie form to see if one of the old uses could be for pies.

Which leads me to tell you about the gargantuan amount of research and work that went into each apple find. Lee and Edith traveled far and wide to find old nursery catalogs, books, flyers, and articles describing these apples and their uses. These descriptions, aside from their elderly caretakers, were all they had left in terms of what these apples were used for. Dried apples. Pies. Molasses/Syrup. Fresh eating. Winter storage. Dumplings. Hard cider. Vinegar. And the list goes on. Edith and Lee were at the helm of running a home lab to try and bring back a purpose for these apples.

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We’re all eating “Tony,” one of Lee’s most resilient apples.

In 2015, I traveled to Lee’s house for the second time with my friends Pete Halupka and Pete Walton to sit down and drink some hard cider with him. We asked him what the chances of finding old lost Southern cultivars might be in this day and age. He responded, matter of factly, that it is nearly impossible in today’s time. So many pressures endanger an apple tree on the landscape, time being the greatest of all when it comes to old Southern apples. In seeing our fruit explorer hopes being dashed, he quickly amended this statement by saying the chances are nearly impossible of discovering identities of these fruits we find in the landscape, but we may very well still find old apple trees. He also encouraged the exploration of mulberry and other nut trees like pecans, as they are much more long-lived than the apple.

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Lee Calhoun was a member of the North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX) and his contributions went beyond apples, as he was also the one to re-introduce the Silk Hope mulberry to the US fruit world. He would tell me of streets in Chapel Hill lined with old Silk mulberry cultivars and the sleeping mulberry landscape of North Carolina which remained despite the failure of an industry. He also collected old rose cultivars, telling me that most of his rose genetics came from cemeteries throughout the South. He grew plums, peaches, sour cherries, grapes and other fruits at his house as well. Even the mightiest of the mighty fruit explorers fall to wanting to plant a little bit of everything.

The world has lost one incredible fruit explorer, but he seemed content with leaving this earth. A mutual friend of ours, Carl Thomasson, visited Lee on Wednesday at hospice, where he was lucid and grateful to have been given a couple extra victory laps of life after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 3 years ago.

Lee and Edith are now driving down old country roads, spotting apple trees and “signs of the elderly.” Together again, the old truck doors shut and they make their way up the steps of a stranger’s porch. Each knock on the door filled with the thrills of being on the heels of recapturing a piece of history and breathing new life into it.

Picture from Calhoun’s book “Old Southern Apples”

*Lee’s orchard was nearly destroyed by fireblight in the 2000s. His nursery business was passed to several nurseries, of which David Vernon of Century Farm Orchards and Horne Creek Historical Farm are still active.*

Fun Fact: Creighton Lee Calhoun was the last remaining descendent of John C. Calhoun, founder of Clemson University, and former US vice president.

Lee Calhoun’s List of Cedar Apple Rust Resistant Apples:

American Golden Dorsett		Morgan
Aunt Rachael		Muskmelon Sweet
Aunt Sally		Old Fashion Winesap
Ben Davis		Ophir
Benham		Pinky
Bevan’s Favorite		Polly Eades
Black Limbertwig		Pomme Gris
Blacktwig		Pound Pippin
Cherryville Black		Red Astrachan
Dixie Red Delight		Red Canada
Dr. Matthews		Red Limbertwig
Fall Orange		Red Rebel
FREEDOM/LIBERTY		Rockingham Red
Gilpin		Rusty Coat
Golden Harvey		Sally Gray
Harris		Short Core
Honey Cider		Sine Qua Non
Hunge		Starr
Ingram		Summer King
Jarrett		Summer Rambo
Jakes Seedling		Swazie
John Apple		Sweet Russet
June Sweeting		Terry Winter
Keener Seedling		Tony
Kinnaird’s Choice		William’s Favorite
Lacy		Winter Jon
Lowland Raspberry		Wolf River
Lugar Red		Yellow Transparent
Mattamuskeet