TODAY IN THE ORCHARD
Checking out the Gravensteins in Dan Bussey’s Illustrated History. Note the "Red Gravenstein" sliced on the plate.
The beauty of these cold blustery winter days is that they provide an opportunity to rummage through the boxes of apples in the rootcellar and pull out the promising submissions from last fall for identification. Today Alyssa Gavlik and I tackled the apples we gathered with Todd Little-Siebold on Swans Island off Mount Desert in October. The rootcellar has been good to the apples this winter, and all the Swans Island submissions still look great. One cultivar in particular was a focus of attention: a possible Red Gravenstein sport.
As readers of this report know, Gravenstein is one of the most important apples in the world. However, even with a lot of DNA analysis, its origin and parentage remain a mystery. We do know that it is exceedingly old. Pomologists have made an assortment of pronouncements about where it came from. Most of them (or all) are likely incorrect. To further complicate the story Gravenstein has “spawned” a large number of sports adding another degree of challenge to the identifications.
Researching sports comes with its own set of confusing elements, not the least of which are the names. As far as current technology can determine, sports and the original trees on which they originated have the same DNA profile - essentially they are like identical twins. So it would make a lot of sense to include the name of the parent tree in the name of the sport. Unfortunately that has not been the accepted practice. Identifying all the sports of Gravenstein with their unrelated names is definitely a challenge. (Try finding all the Gala sports by name sometime, some of which are downright bizarre.) One of these days, someone should write an article including all the Gravenstein sports from around the world with their cultivar names, histories and photos/paintings of the fruit. The same with all the Gala sports and the Delicious sports too. So much to do!
