The first apple was not very tempting. It grew in present day Kazakhstan and would have been small and bitter. A sort of wild crabapple, it spread from its Asian homeland across the cooler, forested areas of Europe, spread by birds.
However, it was domesticated and developed into something sweet and plump early on. Olives, figs, pomegranates and grapes were the first group of fruits to be domesticated from the wild about 10,000 years ago, and in the next tranche came apples. It needed someone to work out the art of grafting, because apple trees grown from seed show a wildly unpredictable diversity.
The fruit of trees spread by Johnny Appleseed in the US in the 1800s were sour “spitters†and destined for the cider press rather than eating one a day for good health. In about the 10th century BC the art of grafting had been discovered in the Mediterranean Basin, and the apple was on its way to its heyday, which lasted from the late 1700s to 1900, when in Europe and the US there were thousands of different varieties of apples.
Now, as marketers look for apples that can be kept a long time in storage, have an attractive colour and regular shape, the diversity of apple varieties has been reduced to a handful of what once was available. Apples are also subject to fashion, and perfectly good 10-year-old trees will be ripped out to be replaced with newer varieties. Their fellow pomme fruit, pears, are much less subject to the fickleness of fashion.
Apples enjoy a cooler climate and can been grown at a higher altitude than almost all fruits, and so earned Tasmania the name the Apple Isle. The apple industry in the Huon Valley was 150 years old when the big downturn came in the 1960s. Before then, a 10-acre orchard could support a family, wood packing cases for apples kept a forestry industry alive and once a week a ship would leave Port Huon for Sydney and once a fortnight one would be loaded there for Brisbane, Catherine Watson writes in Full and Plenty, an oral history of apple-growing in the Huon, published in 1987.
A combination of award wages in orchards, Britain’s joining the Common Market, and the need for new packing technologies and new varieties made the small family orchards uneconomic, and between 1961 and 1975 nearly two thirds of apple orchardists in the Huon Valley went out of business, paid by the government to pull out their trees.
The apple industry has made a comeback of course, but no longer looks the same. Big growers account for most of the production of very few varieties. An exception is the Steenholdt family’s certified organic orchard at Petcheys Bay, bought by Chris and Paula Steenholdt in 1970. As other growers were ripping out their apples, the Steenholdts were planting, and now grow about 80 different varieties of apple, including heritage varieties and “sports†that arrive in the orchard by chance.
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