A rare, historically significant French apple tree recently discovered on a Verona Island farm is one of the oldest in North America.
Called the Drap d’Or de Bretagna, the cultivar came from the Brittany region of France and was likely brought to Maine by Castine’s early French settlers in the late 1600s.
The tree, believed to be a direct descendant of early plantings, was rediscovered by a group of local “apple explorers” who are passionate about old apples and what they reveal about history.
The discovery provides important new genetic information about the ancestry of apple trees in Maine and around the country. On top of that, one researcher said, its large, yellow fruit is delicious, and Mainers might be able to grow them in the future.
When historian and apple researcher Todd Little-Siebold saw the tree on Verona for the first time, it looked “completely and utterly visually unremarkable” — small and scrawny compared to other big, hearty apple trees around it.
But he, Maine apple historian John Bunker, and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association had its leaves tested anyway by a fruit tree genetics lab at Washington State University.
A researcher there had found three groups of now-rare French apples are the “grandmothers” of most early American varieties. The previously unidentified Drap d’Or de Bretagna, it turns out, belongs to one of them.
Planting an apple seed doesn’t produce a tree that’s identical to its parents, so to get more of an existing variety, growers “clone” it by grafting cuttings from trees onto established roots.
“A human being had to make this tree, and they had to have access to that French variety,” Little-Siebold said.
That’s how the Verona tree may have descended from old French orchards: through a series of cuttings, like a baton being passed in a relay race.
Little-Siebold said an early tree was likely planted in Castine around the year 1700 and spread this way. The tree on Verona probably came from a cutting off a tree dating back to 1820, researchers said.
As a result, the apple historians are searching for more living French trees in the area. If they find them, it would back up his theory that apple trees were cultivated by Castine’s early settlers and spread throughout the Penobscot Valley.
After many of the French left the area in the mid-18th century following the French and Indian War, Little-Siebold said he believes farmers continued tending and sharing Drap d’Or de Bretagna trees because the fruit tasted good, not necessarily knowing what it was.
The “absolutely spectacular” dense-fleshed apple is complex and almost nutty with strong acid and sugar content, much more dynamic than the limited variety of mostly sweet, crispy apples found in grocery stores today.
Little-Siebold sees the old trees as relics of a lost world in Maine, one where every town had numerous local orchards, small businesses and family farms.
A cutting from the Verona tree will be grafted onto new stock this spring to keep the cultivar growing at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association’s heritage orchard in Unity, which collects and shares 300-plus heritage apple and 20 pear trees from around the state.
In about a decade, the new cutting will hopefully be a fruit-bearing tree, according to orchard program manager C.J. Walke; as it grows, the orchard will be able to share more cuttings with other growers.
Identifying and preserving an older tree helps fill in the historical background and write the next chapter of apples in Maine, Walke said. Trees that can survive years of neglect or tough conditions are also hardy sources of food that people can rely on.
“They connect us to places, teach us about grace, cooperation and collaboration. They are magicians in a world forever in need of magic,” Bunker said of heritage trees in a press release from MOFGA. “On top of all that, we are utterly and completely dependent on them. The plants are truly remarkable creatures.”
The team continues searching for historical trees to rediscover and said they hope this one will be followed by many more.