It was a balmy +20F this morning at the farm. We had a few inches of snow last night, and it kept on snowing all day. I felt like I was in a snow globe, looking out at the Evening Grosbeaks and Jays crowding out the Titmice, Juncos and Chickadees at the feeder.
All morning I continued looking at apples obtained last fall. Today it was the apple Todd and I collected from the “Brown Place” on Park Street in Cherryfield. We were taken to the spindly, shaded tree by Larry Brown who topworked it about thirty years ago.
Larry’s sister and her friend sent me fruit in 2006 wondering if they had found the Cherryfield—aka Collins—apple, a cultivar that originated in Cherryfield in the late 19th century. (see AOD chapter 20). Unfortunately, I think that they did send me the correct Cherryfield and that I may have mixed it up and lost the scionwood. The apple I grew out as Cherryfield DNA profiled as the mid-western cultivar, Salome (pronounced Sa—loam). Salome is an excellent apple but not Cherryfield (unless, of course, they are synonyms.) It could be that they never did have Cherryfield except that the original photos I took in 2006 look disturbingly different than the apple I eventually grew out and profiled. Did I mix up the scionwood somewhere along the way? Argh!
Could they be Cherryfield?
I’ve been meaning to track down Larry Brown for the past few years to see if he could take me to the tree from which the original fruit came. He did that on October 13, 2025. The original tree had died but Larry took Todd and me to a tree on Park Street that he thought he’d grafted from that tree. It was that fruit that I phenotyped today.
To add to the confusion, years ago I sent Larry’s sister a tree that I grafted for her. It’s possible that Larry grafted his tree using my scionwood, not the original wood. The fruit I pulled out of the bag today closely resembles the one ID’ed as Salome. The fruit is smaller than our Salome and coloring is somewhat different though this could be due to the shady roadside location of Larry’s tree. Otherwise the two are remarkably similar. Todd and I did take leaves in October and sent them in for a DNA profile. We’ll see what the results show. I think it may be another Salome. Of course, another possibility is that Cherryfield and Salome were synonyms all along!
I finished up the phenotypic comparison and headed out to the orchard to cut firewood along the fence line. Fortunately I can tell a maple from an apple tree!