SPRINGHOUSE FARM JOURNAL
By: Heather Lovett
There is something so inviting about a mature apple tree. On hot summer days its dense canopy offers welcome shade, and in the fall, the fresh, clean scent of its ripening fruitthe pure essence of autumndraws creatures far and wide, from the deer that visit faithfully every morning and evening down through the smaller animals (humans included) to insects that eat up all the juicy bits and pieces left behind. Even in winter when its leaves are gone an old apple tree with its gnarled limbs and mottled bark is a friendly, familiar character, like all the apple trees remembered from childhood storybooks.
I am eternally grateful to the Moore family who lived here before us for planting apple trees on the property, and for giving them a good start with careful pruning. Were he alive today, Robert Moore would probably shake his head in dismay at our benign neglect, but most of the trees are doing quite well without our help. There are three remaining in the old orchard and an ancient one at the far end of a pasture, but our pride and joy is the Granny Smith apple tree right outside our back door.
It has a graceful, 25-foot spread and a trunk circumference of 48 inches, and is a favorite climbing tree for visiting children. This is the one tree my husband prunes every year, and in a sense it has become his pruning school. Over the years he’s developed a feel for the job, and though he always claims he doesn’t know what he’s doing, the tree responds well, filling out to form a rounded, symmetrical crown by the Fourth of July.
Granny Smith was a real person Maria Anne Smith, born Maria Anne Sherwood in Peasmarsh, England in 1799. She married Thomas Smith, a farm laborer from the neighboring parish of Beckley, where they set up housekeeping and began raising a family. In 1838, government agents recruited them along with other families in the area to settle the British colony of New South Wales. Thomas Smith worked on several estates in and around Sydney before buying his own land, a parcel of about 25 acres on the edge of the Field of Mars Common in Eastwood. For the rest of their lives the Smiths cultivated an orchard on this site, passing it down to two of their sons, Thomas Jr. and Charles Smith.
According to local legend, Maria went to market one day and bought a barrel of French crabapples that were grown in Tasmania. Some of the apples were spoiled, and she dumped them on a garbage pile near a creek on her property, and out of this garbage pile grew an apple tree unlike any known variety. She shared her discovery with neighboring orchardists, and soon many of them were growing the new "Smith seedling" on their farms.
Unfortunately, Maria Smith did not live long enough to see her apple become a world-wide commercial success. Twenty-one years after her death in 1870, "Granny Smith’s Seedling" won the prize for best cooking apple in the Castle Hill Agricultural and Horticultural Show. Large scale cultivation began soon thereafter, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that this unique green apple caught on in the United States.
It might not have happened at all without the help of Grady Auvil, a Washington State apple grower known to some as "Mr. Granny Smith." For years, Grady Auvil had been lamenting the takeover of the state’s orchards by the bland Red Delicious apple, crowding out the much more flavorful (but less pretty) Winesap. When a new sweet/tart green apple appeared on the import market in the 1950s he took notice, and though the trees were hard to find, he obtained stock from New Zealand and began growing them in his orchard, harvesting his first crop in 1975. Thanks to his tireless promotion, and the apple’s superior keeping qualities and taste, Granny Smith is a well-known, popular variety today.
(An interesting side note: Grady Auvil’s experience in Washington State was played out on a smaller scale on the Moore farm in New Jersey. When they sold their house, the Moores left behind an old Christmas card with a diagram of the trees planted in their little orchard scribbled on the back. I pulled the card out recently, and noticed that one of the apple trees was originally marked "Winesap," but was crossed out and replaced by "Red Delicious." Grady Auvil would be pleased to know that the Red Delicious is one of the two apple trees that haven’t survived, and I’m tempted to plant a Winesap in its place.)
We don’t spray our apple trees, so our fruit looks nothing like the Granny Smiths in the supermarket. Ours tend to be blotched and misshapen, often with telltale insect holes, but their tangy flavor is wonderful, raw or cooked. After careful surgery to remove the blemishes I slice them thinly for salads, and, of course, big chunks of them go into pies.
Early in October I mentioned to a friend that my husband had made the "best ever" apple pie with our Granny Smith apples (Dad bakes the pies in our household), and she said she was sure I’d told her the same thing at the same time last year. She is probably right, but after being deprived for a year, our Granny Smith pies always taste special.
After all the apples are gone our apple trees provide food in other ways. Woodpeckers are frequent visitors, gleaning insects from the bark, and not long ago I watched from my kitchen window as a yellow-bellied sapsucker drilled a row of holes around a thick branch of the Granny Smith tree. Later, I went out to inspect the sapsucker’s work, and found the branch encircled with many necklaces of sap holes.
As I examined them with a magnifying glass it suddenly occurred to me that apple trees provide sweetness every season of the yearsweet-scented apple blossoms in the spring, sweet shade in summer, apples in the fall, and sap in the winter. It’s no wonder apple trees have been associated with paradise since the beginning of recorded history.
Sources:
Miller Nurseries: 5060 West Lake Road, Canandaigua, N.Y., 14424. Phone (800 ) 836-9630.; www.millernurseries.com (Granny Smith, Winesap, and many other apple trees.)
Auvil Fruit (the "Gee Whiz" brand) apple gift boxes: (800) 346-0953.
Frank Browning. "Apples." New York: North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
John Spurway (great-great grandson of Granny Smith) and Megan Martin. "Granny Smith, Her Apple." Ryde, New South Wales: Ryde Library & Information Services, 1992; www.ryde.nsw.gov.au/granny.htm.