slices.”
When Bussey purchased his family’s land, he began restoring the orchard even before remodeling the old house. “By then, the orchard had been left to disrepair and I was set on reclaiming it,” he said. “I remembered my grandfather’s stories of his favorite apple, the T. E. Pippin, and was determined to find it. So I put an ad in the local paper offering a twenty-five-dollar reward to anyone willing to share seedlings or cuttings. The guy who replied said, on the phone, ‘I don’t want your money, I’m just happy to meet someone interested in these apples.’” As we strolled Seed Savers Exchange’s heritage apple orchard, Bussey told me, “That first early effort made me realize how deeply connected to this romantic fruit we all are. I’ve been connecting with apple lovers ever since.”
At Seed Savers Exchange, Bussey is charged with reclaiming the older varieties, by sleuthing leads in newspapers and on websites, and foraging through abandoned farms. “The network of apple enthusiasts devoted to this fruit is amazingly wide and passionate,” Bussey said. “I’ve been to big orchards, where the owner will put the most popular varieties out for sale—Honeycrisp, for example—but when that knowledgeable, long-time regular customer shows up, he’ll reach under the table and pull up his special heritage apples.”
All things apple seem to find Bussey, as well. “When I first began pressing cider on my own farm, people brought me apples from their backyards and shared their childhood memories; everyone seems to have a story. I believe these things come to me for a reason. It’s my destiny.”
The rolling Historic Orchard is a Grand Central Station of trees—the tall and straight rub shoulders with the gnarled, skinny, and squat—with over eleven hundred different varieties forming one of the largest collections in the country. “I love the names of some of the older apples,” Bussey said, pointing them out. “Sheepnose, Chenango Strawberry, Cow’s Snout. It’s part of what makes them so interesting and worth seeking out.” Their names only begin to suggest the wild variety of their flavors and strengths. “Every apple has a purpose,” Bussey continued. “Most of the older varieties were bred for baking, sauce, and cider. Storage was the major concern.” Many of the very old, wilder varieties have thick skins and a strong acid content to repel harmful critters, so make for poor eating out of hand.
Bussey reached into a big tree’s full, wide canopy, so heavy with fruit its branches were weighed low to the ground. “Geneva Crab,” he said, plucking off a perfectly round, bright-red apple and cupping it in his outreached palm. “This was developed by Miss Isabella Preston, in the 1930s, who worked for the Department of Agriculture in Canada. It’s descended from the Russian crab apple, called niedzwetskyana.” He spelled it out for me. “Came to South Dakota in the late 1800s with Mr. Niels Hansen, via Virginia . . . ” Bussey sliced the apple crosswise to reveal a white star surrounded by shockingly red flesh the color of the peel, and then offered me a slice. It was gently astringent, soft and memorable. “It’s not bad for eating,” he commented, rolling his piece up to the roof of his mouth like wine. “But it adds spectacular color to cider.”
Along with all the culinary benefits from these different varieties comes a healthier, more successful orchard. A diverse orchard is a secure orchard because different trees will respond differently to the pressures of weather, pests, and disease. If one type of apple tree is destroyed, others may still survive. “It’s critical to have a variety of apple trees. Diversity is the key to resilience; it’s also the key to flavor,” Bussey said.
The classes and workshops Bussey offers at Seed Savers Exchange and across the country sell out as soon as they’re posted. He teaches the time-tried skills of grafting, pruning, and identifying apple stock. And the economic prospects for heirloom apples are, in many ways, better than they’ve been in over a century, thanks to the recent resurgence of hard cider, apple wines, and spirits. The astonishing growth in artisanal cideries is helping drive demand for the wilder, more unusual fruit.
Cider apples tend to be small with a large skin-to-flesh ratio. “There’s really nothing new about hard cider,” Bussey said. Until the late 1800s, it was preferred over beer and folks drank it instead of water, which was often unsafe. Even kids drank cider because milk was reserved for making butter and cheese. Good hard cider relies on mostly tart apples, high in tannin, the throat-catching acid most often associated with wine. Cider apples can be so astringent that they are known as “spitters,” but when blended with juice pressed from sweet apples, they help make a nice balance. “And there’s cider vinegar and apple spirits,” Bussey continued. “I know we can distill a brandy as good as any French calvados.
“The challenge we have in trying to restore these apples is in helping people understand their different uses,” Bussey said. “They cover a gamut of flavors and textures and each variety has a purpose. Communicating this information is the hardest part of my work.”
RAFT, Seed Savers Exchange, and orchardists like Bussey are making it possible for researchers, commercial orchardists, and amateurs to preserve and share heritage seeds, learn how to graft and raise apple trees without chemicals, press cider for distilling and drinking fresh, and market their fruit, all funded by foundations, individuals, and grants with scant support from the US government.
“Particularly flavorful apples grow on trees that are deeply rooted in particular kinds of soil and in the rich traditions of particular landscapes,” Bussey said. Widely heralded apples such as Wolf River present a certain terroir, the taste of a place that is influenced by environmental factors, not just genetics alone. Flavor drives Bussey’s work and is becoming the key to reviving the industry.
When your favorite tree gives you too many apples, make sauce. Picking apples is mesmerizing and getting our sons to come down from the Land School’s tree to head home was a challenge. The trunkload of fruit filled the car with the sweet scents of damp grass and decay.
Back in our kitchen, our oldest son, Matt, the most cautious one, sliced the apples to reveal the star in the center and passed them to Tim, the youngest, who took this work seriously and removed the skins with a peeler. Then Kip, the least patient and most easily bored, pitched each half into the pot, a few feet from the counter. On the stove the sauce burbled its cinnamon comfort. They’d take turns stirring the pot until the sauce simmered into a fine, caramel mash.
One indigo afternoon, just as we returned from the orchard, my father called to say he’d landed in town and hoped it wouldn’t be an imposition to spend the night. Because he was an amateur pilot, it wasn’t odd for him to fly cross-country, earning “air miles,” but he never arrived unannounced. That night, he entered the kitchen subdued and weary. What had motivated the trip, and why was he so downtrodden? A spat with my mother? A business setback? Distracted by homework, dinner, baths, and applesauce, I didn’t ask.
But what I recall now is how, as he sat at the table, he relaxed in the glow of a Scotch in his hand, seemingly soothed by the boys, who scrambled up on his lap and hopped down to stir sauce. The kitchen filled with good smells while he shared stories of his war years on an escort ship in the Pacific and then of “bumming” through Alsace, France, and the orchards and the calvados of our exotic ancestral home.
The other day, our now twenty-five-year-old son, Kip, invited me over for dinner, and as I tripped over the bushel of apples in his doorway, it wasn’t hard to discern that he needed my help making applesauce and apple butter. As we peeled and sliced I realized that apples embody the endless qualities of motherhood: of risk, comfort, and promise. Cooking in my son’s kitchen, I was knocked back into the presence of my father and of our boys in the trees, and into the moments of reckless joy balancing on branches myself.
Some say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but as our sons mature, I watch myself becoming the child of my children,
