Today in the orchard
Todd Little-Siebold and I headed “downeast” to the town of Cherryfield in search of the true Cherryfield (aka Collins) apple. We’ve been scheming about such a trip for a couple of years. The DNA profile of the apple tree we thought was Cherryfield matched an old Illinois apple called Salome. We’ve now found this same Salome in multiple Maine locations. The phenotype also appears to be Salome. So most likely we had Cherryfield wrong. Once we got over the disappointment, we decided to go back to square one, and that meant a trip back to Cherryfield to find Larry Brown, the fellow who sent me two apples from a tree he had grafted from a far-older tree—the apple I thought was Cherryfield.
Even before the DNA profile, I had some lingering doubts about our “Cherryfield.” I had photographed the two apples Larry Brown sent to me nearly twenty years ago. They did not match the apples from our grafts—the apples we eventually DNA profiled. Something must have been mixed up somewhere along the way. What we had was, apparently, not what Larry had found and sent us. (As Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler famously uttered long ago, “mistakes were made…”) This prompted today’s return trip to Cherryfield in search of the source tree of those two original apples.
We found Larry who took us to the tree from which those first two apples came. It was not in good shape, but it did have a few reasonably decent-looking fruit. We took fruit and leaves. The fruit is definitely not Salome. That’s a good thing. We’ll do a complete detailed description and see if it matches any other apples we know. I’ll also compare the fruit to the photo I still have of Larry’s fruit. We’ll submit leaves for a DNA profile. Then we’ll keep our fingers crossed (an old scientist’s trick).