{"blyg":"0.4","id":"75wzvxd1rx6xr11qf11w56nn2n","kind":"thread","origin":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/","page":"t/75wzvxd1rx6xr11qf11w56nn2n/","author":{"name":"Kyle Mathews","url":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/"},"created":"2026-09-28T02:08:11Z","updated":"2026-09-28T02:16:06Z","version":1,"content_md":"The story it turns out is even weirder than I thought. \n\nA few pieces of it:\n\n1. **Apples didn't start small and sour.** In the wild Tian Shan forests of Kazakhstan, *Malus sieversii* already produced big, sweet, wildly flavorful fruit — hazelnut, anise, honey, berry notes — and a small fraction of wild trees are essentially supermarket quality, which almost never happens with wild fruit. The reason seems to be the bears: they prefer the same large, sweet, red apples we do, and they're the ones dispersing the seeds. So the forest had been running human-style selection for us, without us. ([BBC Future, \"Kazakhstan's treasure trove of wildly-flavoured apples\"](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161025-kazakhstans-treasure-trove-of-wildly-flavoured-apples))\n\n2. **Moving west made them *more* diverse, not less.** Carried along the horse/silk routes, those Tien Shan apples crossed with the Caucasian *M. orientalis* and then heavily with the European crabapple *M. sylvestris*. Modern dessert apples are roughly a third sieversii and a third sylvestris by ancestry. Domestication here wasn't a bottleneck — it was hybridization. The cultivated apple's pan-genome is larger than either wild parent's.\n\n3. **Then America did the Tien Shan experiment again, for booze.** Cider was the default drink of early colonists, and cider doesn't need a good variety — so people planted seeds rather than grafting. Every apple seed is genetically novel, so this was an enormous continental breeding trial. Over 15,000 named American cultivars emerged by the mid-19th century; the USDA has documented about 16,350, most now extinct or nearly so.\n\n4. **China had its own apple, and lost it.** Eastward, sieversii met the Siberian crabapple *M. baccata* and produced a parallel tradition — *M. asiatica*, *M. prunifolia* — cultivated for ~2,000 years. Then in the late 19th century the western hybrid lineage was reintroduced from Europe and America and commercially displaced it. Japan's industry is almost entirely a Western overlay.\n\n![[73t9brh6db5ef66t10hx9h2qsj]] \n\n5. **And the lost varieties are still out there, growing in people's yards.** A gnarled old apple tree on Verona Island, Maine turned out, when Cameron Peace's lab at Washington State genotyped it, to exactly fill a \"missing ancestor\" slot they'd already inferred from the pedigrees of hundreds of American apples. It's *Drap d'Or de Bretagne* — Brittany's cloth of gold — a French cultivar so nearly extinct in Europe that the only other known copy was sitting in a University of Copenhagen collection. Settlers evidently carried it across the Atlantic and it quietly outlived its homeland. Two more genetically identical old trees turned up within about 20 miles, so someone had deliberately propagated it in that French-influenced stretch of Maine. Which makes the tree a kind of archaeological artifact made of living DNA: a lost progenitor still carrying ancestral variants that dropped out of the modern commercial breeding pool entirely. ([Scientific American, \"How Apple Detectives Solved the Mystery of an Ancient Tree—and Rewrote the History of Fruit\"](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-apple-detectives-solved-the-mystery-of-an-ancient-tree-and-rewrote-the-history-of-fruit/) — in print, October 2026, as \"The Mystery Tree\")\n\n![[73t9brh6db5ef66t10hx9h2qsj]]\n\n","content_html":"

The story it turns out is even weirder than I thought.

\n

A few pieces of it:

\n
    \n
  1. \n

    Apples didn't start small and sour. In the wild Tian Shan forests of Kazakhstan, Malus sieversii already produced big, sweet, wildly flavorful fruit — hazelnut, anise, honey, berry notes — and a small fraction of wild trees are essentially supermarket quality, which almost never happens with wild fruit. The reason seems to be the bears: they prefer the same large, sweet, red apples we do, and they're the ones dispersing the seeds. So the forest had been running human-style selection for us, without us. (BBC Future, "Kazakhstan's treasure trove of wildly-flavoured apples")

    \n
    2. \n
  2. \n

    Moving west made them more diverse, not less. Carried along the horse/silk routes, those Tien Shan apples crossed with the Caucasian M. orientalis and then heavily with the European crabapple M. sylvestris. Modern dessert apples are roughly a third sieversii and a third sylvestris by ancestry. Domestication here wasn't a bottleneck — it was hybridization. The cultivated apple's pan-genome is larger than either wild parent's.

    \n
    3. \n
  3. \n

    Then America did the Tien Shan experiment again, for booze. Cider was the default drink of early colonists, and cider doesn't need a good variety — so people planted seeds rather than grafting. Every apple seed is genetically novel, so this was an enormous continental breeding trial. Over 15,000 named American cultivars emerged by the mid-19th century; the USDA has documented about 16,350, most now extinct or nearly so.

    \n
    4. \n
  4. \n

    China had its own apple, and lost it. Eastward, sieversii met the Siberian crabapple M. baccata and produced a parallel tradition — M. asiatica, M. prunifolia — cultivated for ~2,000 years. Then in the late 19th century the western hybrid lineage was reintroduced from Europe and America and commercially displaced it. Japan's industry is almost entirely a Western overlay.

    \n
    5. \n
\n

![[73t9brh6db5ef66t10hx9h2qsj]]

\n
\n
    \n
  1. And the lost varieties are still out there, growing in people's yards. A gnarled old apple tree on Verona Island, Maine turned out, when Cameron Peace's lab at Washington State genotyped it, to exactly fill a "missing ancestor" slot they'd already inferred from the pedigrees of hundreds of American apples. It's Drap d'Or de Bretagne — Brittany's cloth of gold — a French cultivar so nearly extinct in Europe that the only other known copy was sitting in a University of Copenhagen collection. Settlers evidently carried it across the Atlantic and it quietly outlived its homeland. Two more genetically identical old trees turned up within about 20 miles, so someone had deliberately propagated it in that French-influenced stretch of Maine. Which makes the tree a kind of archaeological artifact made of living DNA: a lost progenitor still carrying ancestral variants that dropped out of the modern commercial breeding pool entirely. (Scientific American, "How Apple Detectives Solved the Mystery of an Ancient Tree—and Rewrote the History of Fruit" — in print, October 2026, as "The Mystery Tree")
    2. \n
\n
\n\n
\n

There’s this theory that the maximal diversity of any evolutionary type is found at its origin point. Languages have most accents and dialects near origin, human genetic diversity is highest in east Africa apparently.

\n

Though apples are native to Central Asia apparently, I’d guess more diversity wherever they were most aggressively bred, which might be Europe?

\n\n
\n

I was recently in London for work and went to the Marylebone farmers’ market mostly to sample apples. I was struck by how little overlap there was with the varieties I know from the US. Cox was the only one I recognized.

\n

Why are the varieties so different? Is it mainly climate, or did apple growing simply diverge on either side of the Atlantic?

\n

Short answer: Both, but the history matters more. Early American orchards were often grown from European apple seeds, and each seed produced a new variety. Growers kept and grafted the seedlings they liked, while British growers made their own selections. Climate shaped which apples did well, and local market stalls make that long divergence especially visible.

\n\n
\n\n
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