The memory orchard

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 29th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: finding the apples that fell far from the tree.

The Pacific Northwest was once home to about 17,000 apple varieties. Early pioneers planted these trees for homestead orchards and hard cider production.

Today, only about a quarter are still cultivated, while the rest have been lost to time.

MAST: But apple enthusiasts have set out to bring some special varieties back.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher spoke to them about the fruit of their labors and has our story.

EMMA EICHER: Roy Druffel and David Benscoter call themselves “apple detectives.” At Druffel’s farm in Pullman, Washington, they sit side-by-side on the back of a pickup truck.

Here’s Benscoter:

BENSCOTER: We kind of figure out the history of the home or where the apple was found, and then we do two types of testing.

Fifteen years ago, Benscoter founded the Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit organization where volunteers travel all over the Pacific Northwest to find the rare fruit.

BENSCOTER: It's just prime lost apple hunting.

So far, they’ve rediscovered many varieties and are growing them here at Druffel’s farm. Walking through the rows of small trees, some are weighed down with green, unripe apples. Here’s Druffel:

DRUFFEL: Now this year, this one is going to be …

BENSCOTER: Right now, it’s a no-name.

DRUFFEL: Yeah, I planted it, and there's not been a DNA of yet, so this year will be the prime example of us not knowing what the tree is. This is going to be a wonderful apple.

But those apples aren’t always “wonderful.”

DRUFFEL: Sometimes it looks really good and sometimes it looks terrible. RD100, that was a really nice looking apple, but it doesn't taste good at all. We're better spitters than we are good at eating apples, but it's pretty fun.

Benscoter says the taste matters because it can be a test for whether the apple is actually lost.

BENSCOTER: When we find a good apple near a homestead or a place believed to be a homestead, we will, first thing we do is taste test the apple, because the pioneers didn't eat bad tasting apples.

Volunteers spend their spare time combing through abandoned orchards and gardens for the lost varieties. If a sample can’t be identified from sight and taste alone, they’ll send the apple to experts for DNA profiling.

Druffel and Benscoter are currently growing 20-25 varieties they’ve found over the years. And they’ve planted many more that remain unidentified—and unnamed.

BENSCOTER: We have had a couple of instances where the experts cannot agree on what the apple is, and so what we'll do in that case is give it a temporary name, and that happened with the Polly Bemis apple.

Polly Bemis was a Chinese-American pioneer who lived in Idaho and had apple trees on her homestead. Now, those varieties are named after her—a solution for when there’s expert disagreement.

Benscoter says while the analysis sometimes produces uncertain outcomes, at least there are still experts to rely on. For now.

BENSCOTER: There's only four apple experts in the United States, and a couple of them I will call elderly. So if we can't get new apple identification experts, it's going to be really tough.

Another challenge: identifying apple characteristics is a skill that few have mastered.

BENSCOTER: There's like 50 different characteristics of an apple. Everything from the seed shape to the length of the stem. And the people that were taught it now mostly learned it from somebody else.

And on top of that, maintaining an orchard requires know-how and adjusting to setbacks. Druffel says he tends the orchard almost every night to trim branches affected by something called fire blight.

BENSCOTER: They haven't been able to find a cure for it. Just one day, you'll see a limb, an outer limb, that looks like it's had fire, been burned.

It takes at least four years for the trees to bear fruit, and during that time Druffel and Benscoter fight off insects, disease, and weather damage. But when they get a taste of success…

BENSCOTER: It's fun, especially when we get the word that we have found a lost apple. That's a hard feeling to replicate. We brought back some history that we thought was lost, and that's a really good feeling.

Benscoter has always kept an eye out for one specific variety: the Walbridge apple.

Early settlers once widely planted the tree across the West, until it mysteriously disappeared.

Tomorrow: the story of the Walbridge.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Eicher in Pullman, Washington.

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