Do You Have a Seedling or a Grafted Tree?

Whether you’re tracking down and preserving historic apples, doing apple I.D.s, or searching for new and useful Malus seedlings, you need to be able to tell a seedling from grafted tree. For the apple identifier, being able to do so saves a lot of time: if it’s from seed, it has no name. For the apple explorer, if it’s a seedling, you know you’ve just made an unnamed discovery.

So, how do we tell the difference?

Seedlings

When an apple tree grows from a seed, it takes on its own unique persona not only in fruit but also in the shape of the tree itself. This is the tree form. We should be able to recognize a seedling apple just by looking at the tree form. Every one of them develops their own unique personality. They may resemble one or both of their parents, but the key is that the shape of the seedling tree will rarely conform to the norm of the cultivated orchard. It will look uncultivated, noticeably out of place in an orchard world where conformity is the priority.

The wild seedling branches out according to its own plan. It leans and spreads and twists and turns. Like Henry David Thoreau, the seedling marches to a different drummer. Sometimes you won’t see a branch for twenty-five feet. Other times, it grows into a tangled bush. The branches themselves tend to be spiny and unforgiving, as though they are saying, “Leave me alone. I do my own thing.”

The seedling is an escapee. It knows no boundaries. It chooses to grow where it wants to grow. Seedlings don’t like straight rows. They mostly avoid fields unless there’s some protection and a bit of shade. They definitely don’t like the deep forest; not enough light for them there. They usually don’t care much for lawns either. Seedling apples like edges. They love the side of the road, the stone wall, the stream edge, the woods’ edge. You can even find them between the boulders by the sea. They like almost any spot where they can have their feet in the forest and their head in the sky. They don’t mind leaning. You can see they love to lean out of the forest. When you see a tree leaning over with branches on one side and none on the other, you know you’ve found a seedling.

Seedling apple trees are frequently multi-trunked. They can disguise themselves as a clump of white birch or red maple. Sometimes you’ll find a multi-trunked apple tree with one trunk grafted. Be on the lookout for that variation. It’ll be on someone’s front lawn. When you come across an ornamental crab in town with pink flowers and white flowers on the same tree, look down. I’ll bet it has more than one trunk. Trunk #1 is the grafted crab. Trunk #2 is a renegade white-flowering rootstock sprouting from below the graft.

Grafted Trees

Grafted trees, on the other hand, have a dignified and civilized look. Many of the most famous varieties were originally selected in part because of their desirable form. They were born conformists. Born of privilege. Selected. Many received their early training in a nursery. Clipped and tended and fertilized. Primped and poofed. Then set out in straight rows, thirty feet each way, and then pruned to fit the mold. Don’t step out of line! No branch out of place! Individuality not recommended. They’re shaped by a pruning saw. Someone long ago wanted to give them some form in hopes of one day picking the fruit. Even after long periods of neglect, that form should be still visible, even if the branches are gone. Often you must use your imagination to reconstruct the original shape of the tree back in its day. Does it look as though it’s ever been in partnership with people? This is about seeing the past in the present. Does the tree look as though someone took care of it? Or does it resemble a maple or the birch?

Grafted trees will often have a single trunk with a lower tier of horizontal branches or the remnants thereof. That first tier may be as low as three feet or as high as six feet. Once upon a time each one had a regimented form. Some of those branches may still be there. Sometimes large verticals called “water sprouts” have emerged and risen from the lower branches, distorting the shape of the tree. Conversely, the tree may now have no branches at all. Look for holes in the trunk indicating lower branches have rotted off. This is an old grafted tree.

Old trees will sometimes look like umbrellas or palm trees with no limbs for the first twenty feet, topped off with a few branches and a scattering of fruit only a very tall ladder or a long pole picker can reach. Look at that beautiful fruit that is totally inaccessible. Is this a seedling or a grafted tree? You can have two apple trees that both look like an umbrella yet one was clearly grafted and the other is clearly a seedling. From a distance your tree could be either, but up close it should be possible to figure out. If it has evidence of lower branches, such as large holes a few feet off the ground or rotted broken stubs of branches, then it could easily have been grafted. Having not been pruned for many years, the old grafted tree grows taller and taller. The top growth shades out the lower growth which then atrophies and drops to the ground. You’re left with an umbrella of new growth hanging over a trunk that used to support branches but is now stripped bare.

If, on the other hand, your umbrella has no indication of any substantial branches down low, you probably have a seedling. In this case the tree grew tall rapidly like a pine tree in the woods. The pine tree growing in the center of a field is like an orchard apple. It produces substantial horizontal branches. These “pasture pines” are branchy, picturesque creatures. On the other hand, a pine tree growing in the woods appears to be a totally different species. Shaded by the surrounding trees, it grows straight up towards the light and sheds its branches before they’re more than an inch or two in diameter. Forest pines often have no substantial branches for thirty or forty feet. Same with wild apples when they grow in the shade of their own upper branches, or the shade of other trees. In these light-challenged conditions they too shed their branches early on. Branch remnants are typically twiggy and small in diameter. Wild seedling trees develop into an apple version of that clear limbless pine in the forest. Even if the woods are later cleared away, you can still recognize this seedling-umbrella-palm-tree apple because there will be no indication of any old lower branches. If you want fruit, you’ll have to do some serious climbing or get out the panking pole.

Grafted trees always have a graft line. Sometimes it’s obscure and nearly impossible to see, but it can be visible even after a hundred years. Sometimes the rootstock is more vigorous than the scion. In that case, the tree rises out of the earth, and then dips in dramatically at the graft line. Other times, the scion is more vigorous than the rootstock. In that case, the scion bulges out at the graft line. Sometimes the dip is so pronounced that the graft is like a bench. Other times the bulges and the dips are subtle, just a ripple around the trunk. Sometimes the wood rises like a mountain range where the scion meets the rootstock. Sometimes the bark color varies right at the graft line. Look for the graft.

How high is the graft above the ground? I have an etching of a French grafter inserting a scion into a cleft graft. It’s an old copy of the famous 1865 painting Man Grafting a Tree by Jean Francois Millet. He’s setting the graft at waist height, probably about three and a half feet off the ground. Three to four feet is probably average, especially for the period before 1900 when farmers were growing rootstock in place and then cleft-grafting them on the spot. Why three or four feet? It’s easy to work at waist height, be it a work bench or a kitchen counter or an apple tree grafting project. A cut-off tree of that height will also be visible to you and everyone else on the farm. Less likely to step on, drive over, or mow with your scythe, cutter bar or Lawn-Boy. It will also grow above deer browsing range more quickly if it’s grafted high. But waist height was by no means universal. You will find trees grafted up by your shoulders, or down by your feet. So look high, look low, and look in between. Once you find one graft in the orchard, chances are good the rest are going to be about the same height.

Variations in soil type don’t seem to matter to the seedlings. Here in Maine, in a good year, you can go exploring for wild apples in every town in the state. Northern Maine’s Aroostook County is a particularly fun place to find them. Aroostook seedlings routinely cover acres of old fields. You can sample hundreds of different apples in a single afternoon. Taste and spit. Taste and spit. Down our way, you can find long tangled hedgerow colonies of seedlings along the roadsides, occasionally stretching for a half mile or more. On the coast, they’ll grow a few feet from the high-tide line. Apples love freedom.

When you come across seemingly random trees that do not fit an orchard pattern, ask yourself if this might have been a place for a cultivated tree. If it’s on a stone wall, the answer is “maybe,” especially if the tree is old. Stone wall seedlings were sometimes topworked to known varieties. Along a roadside, again the answer is “maybe,” especially if the tree is old. Along streams or along the ocean, the answer is more likely no. I have never seen grafted trees in either location. These are your true escapees.

Deeper in the woods, Look for orchard patterns overgrown by the forest. Look for cellar holes and stone walls and other indications that someone lived here long ago. Even in the woods with many of the original trees dead and rotted away, it is usually possible to see the pattern if one ever existed. Once you locate the grid, you should be able to pick out the seedlings that have interspersed themselves over the years among the grafted trees.

Identifying apples is difficult but important work. The old varieties still have much to offer us all as we move forward into uncertainty. Exploring for new varieties will also be key to the future of orcharding. Whenever you’re out in those woods on the prowl for the next great bittersweet cider apple or maybe stopped by the side of the road staring at a tree in the ditch, or sitting by the fire with a glass and a bottle and your copy of The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, identifying some mystery giving to you by a stranger at the local farmers’ market, the first question I hope you’ll ask yourself will be “do you have a seedling or a grafted tree.”