An Apple Expert from Maine Shares His Passion | The Local Food Report

Earlier this year, I finally made the journey north to meet John Bunker — a farmer in his 70s who arguably knows more about apple varieties than almost anyone alive in New England today. I’ve always wanted to meet him. Growing up in Maine, I’d hear about people driving up to John’s farm outside of Augusta, bringing him apples from old trees on their property, and hoping he could help them figure out what variety they were — and how to reproduce them, since apples don’t grow true from seed.

"Every seed in every apple that ever was is like a child, a human child. It is 50 percent a mom, and 50 percent a dad, and not the same 50 percent ever, except in one example and that is identical twins," John explained. "And in apples, there are no identical twins, so apples are even more diverse than humans are. And so if you want a MacIntosh, or whatever, you must graft it."

John first got interested in apples in the 1970s, when he moved to Maine, bought some land, and learned how to graft trees by attaching scions from the apple varieties he wanted to plant onto established rootstock — basically a form of vegetative cloning. Shortly after I arrived at his house, he walked me over to a large, gnarled tree.

"Right here is probably the first graft that I ever did, and as I learned about these varieties, I learned that if I wanted them, I was going to have to learn to graft, or go buy a tree. But the apples that I was interested weren’t the ones that you could buy in a catalog they were the ones that the old-timers were growing up and down the roads,"
he said. "So as I began to learn about these historic, heirloom whatever you want to call them heritage apple varieties, then I began to understand that many of them were endangered."

John learned that in the mid-19th century, there were about 17,000 named apple varieties. Today, that number is less than 5,000, but apple trees can live for more than a century — and John realized that old farms were probably home to countless old, forgotten varieties.

"They were not in any collections anywhere, or if they were, I didn’t know about them. The trees were getting very old. And I came to realize that if somebody didn’t save them, they would be gone forever."

Out On A Limb Apples

John didn’t know of anyone else trying to do this. He realized if he didn’t, there might not be anyone, so he got started.

"What I would do is I would take the scions, the cuttings off of these old trees and bring them and put them onto one of my trees. And you can put a different variety on every branch because you can graft anywhere. So each one of these tags on this tree is a different variety. And some I knew what the names were because the old timer told me — I didn't know one from another. And then others, I still don't know the names of them, but they are very, very rare and old and unusual."

John added, "And so I keep them and I keep a sort of, I guess you'd say a provisional name on them. And then as time went by, many of the source trees died, or were cut down, and so it became a situation where the only one left was here. And eventually I started a small nursery catalog and began to sell some of them through Fedco."

John says partly this was a way of financially supporting his habit, but also, it became a way of getting more trees out there so they could be grown and grafted and shared by other people. And in the fifty or so years since he began identifying and sharing old apples — he’s been joined by like-minded people all over the U.S. and beyond.

"And so some of them have become my friends and we collaborate and commiserate and laugh and graft and they now are helping me, or I’m helping them. We’re working together to make this happen. It’s about collaboration on every level."

These days Bunker joins a Zoom call once every couple weeks with apple experts from all over the world they put their heads together to help each other identify and preserve old varieties. He’s focused almost entirely on apples that have grown historically in Maine — because, he told me, he realized a long time ago that this could keep him busy for the rest of his life — and he says, so far, it has.

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Find more information about John Bunker here.