Sueboo Russets and Sue Gawler’s 2010 Maine Ecosystem guide.
TODAY IN THE ORCHARD
As the wind blew clouds of snow back and forth across the farm today, I decided I should “take a virtual trip” back to my favorite childhood place, Belgrade Lakes, Maine. I pulled out a bag of apples from Buttermilk Hill on the west side of Great Pond just south of Belgrade Lakes village. This is the original site of the unidentified apple we’ve been referring to as the “Guptill Lavender” because it grew on the Guptill Road. That tree is now dead, but we have grafted it multiple times, including into our orchards here in Palermo.
The apple in question today, however, is a yellow, long-stemmed, fall apple from further up the Guptill Road at the Gawler Farm. The apple was a favorite of the late Susan (Sueboo) Gawler, long time Belgrade resident, exceptional botanist, ecologist and author. I’ve been attempting to help identify the apple off and on for several years and was given a bag of fruit this fall from a tree at North Branch Farm in Monroe that was grafted from the original Buttermilk Hill tree.
The Gawler family calls the apple Sueboo or Sueboo Russet. The yellow fruit is roundish-oblate, medium-sized, with a large, russet splash surrounding the stem and partly covered with russet netting and patches. One of the apple’s most distinctive characteristics is its very long, thin stem. That feature led me to two apples: “Longstem” of Connecticut and “Longstem” of Massachusetts, two old cultivars that may or may not be one and the same. The descriptions of both apples are by no means complete, but they do match “Sueboo Russet” as far as they go. The season also makes sense, and the stem is definitely long!
The next step is to do a DNA profile and see what comes up for a match—if anything—and what we can learn about the ancestry. Knowing both will help with the effort to identify the apple. I’ll collect some scionwood this winter and graft trees in the spring. I’m also hoping to see photos of the original tree or, better yet, pay a visit to Buttermilk Hill and see the tree myself. Sueboo will live on.
