To Understand America, Look to the Everyday Apple

“A dollar a day keeps the doctor away,” Pika, one of my girls, said as she nibbled an afternoon snack at the kitchen table.

I wondered at the way she had mangled the “apple a day” aphorism. The original, “Eat an apple on going to bed and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread,” came from Wales. It took a day before I could ask Pika about the origin of her saying.

She had picked up her dollar-centric version from classmates: “That’s what they all say!”

Like generations before, Pika and her peers are dazzled by the glitter of consumerist culture. Today, they are hyperaware of not only shoes and games but also the 10,000 things that devices “feed” them, starting at eerily early ages. No doubt these kids will one day find ways to navigate materialism, as we did. Still, it can be a struggle for device-savvy youngsters, and parents similarly shackled, to cultivate an intimacy with nature.

At a climate workshop, I asked a veteran schoolteacher with a caring heart about her experiences with students. “It’s hard to talk to young people today about the environment and its issues,” Marty told me, chuckling uncomfortably. “They don’t care.”

Her response stunned me, and I told myself that it was one person’s opinion. I trust that many kids do care. Nature is ideal stomping grounds for their keen sense of play and camaraderie. The apathy some kids might feel could surely have been stoked by the perception that older generations “didn’t care” either—we passed along biodiversity loss and climate change to the kids growing up today. Since kids tend to mimic parents and caregivers, our own relationship with nature has the potential to inspire kids to care more. Such thoughts feel like lonely seeds, but Aeschylus once noted, “From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.”

Apples and bananas continue to be the most consumed fresh fruit per capita by Americans, though we now eat fewer apples than we once did. Since 2000, the consumption of fresh apples has fluctuated between fifteen and nineteen pounds per consumer each year. The most recent numbers show that we eat some fifty apples a year, less than one a week. After a barrage of insipid and oversweet apples, it is perhaps understandable that our love for the fruit has dried up.

Our current disconnect from orchards exemplifies how our relationship with the land has frayed to the point that new generations are more conversant with Apple products than with apple varieties. When I speak to friends and neighbours in their sixties, seventies, or eighties, many have delightful memories of playing in neighbourhood orchards. Amy grew up in Minnesota and recalls after-school wanderings with friends that ended with her standing on a pony to pick apples. Dwight grew up in northern New Mexico nearly eight decades back and recalls getting chased by orchardists and rebuked for “stealing” apples. His parents were schoolteachers and owned a farm and ranch in rural Colfax County, but they abruptly sold it while he was away in college.

We passed along biodiversity loss and climate change to the kids growing up today.

“I still dream about our land,” Dwight says, when I see him on my neighbourhood walks. “I was born there, on a bed, without a doctor. . . . At Christmastime, we kids would go and find the right tree, cut it down, and bring it back to the house.” His eyes gleam as he recalls tree-filled days. “After all these years, I still think about how I might have stopped them from selling the farm. Some days, I wake up thinking about that.”

In the twentieth century, the loss of small farms became inexorable, and the cookie-cutter urbanization that followed continues to spread like a rash over the land. We no longer have tree-filled lives, and kids have fewer opportunities to cultivate a lasting affection for the land as Dwight and Amy once did. What will it take for us to want to grow apple trees for our grandchildren—as John Adams once did?

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I t is perhaps not surprising that, since its infancy, America has loved apples. There’s something sturdy about the apple, a fruit that thrives in temperate regions and is reminiscent of a tart-and-sweet grandma. One might fall on occasion for the sublime peach or the succulent fig, but one unfailingly returns to the bread-and-butter apple. America’s love affair with apples can be parsed into roughly three phases.

The first phase begins with early apple plantings by settlers and Spanish and French colonialists in the 1600s and 1700s. The next phase brought the impassioned efforts of visionaries such as John Chapman (a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed) and Jean-Baptiste Lamy in the first three quarters of the 1800s. A third phase of American apple infatuation began when white settlers dreamed big about apple orchards, capping what the National Park Service calls the “golden age of fruit growing in the 19th century,” as Susan Dolan writes in Fruitful Legacy. According to the US Department of the Interior, by the end of the 1870s, commercial and fruit orchards could be found throughout the forty-eight contiguous states. These commercial orchards, some of them passion projects, would later give way to industrialized orchards—the fourth phase we now find ourselves in.

While the Spanish brought apple seeds to the western US by way of Mexico, settlers from countries such as England and Ireland also travelled to their new home with apple seeds. By 1623, they were growing seedling orchards in New England, primarily for cider. Intriguingly, a Jamestown resident named Ralph Hamor mentioned an orchard there as early as 1615. Sir Thomas Gates had built his residence next to the governor’s mansion, and Hamor writes that “many forward apple & Pear trees come up, of the kernels set there the yeere before” in Gates’s garden.

American apple culture was taking root, and “as American as apple pie” would go on to become a time-honoured phrase (although the original recipe came from Britain). During the domestication of the apple from its Malus sieversii progenitor and through its hybridization, the apple has been under continuous selection for fruit size, flavour, resistance to disease, keeping quality, firmness, and sweetness. The migration of the apple to America added a new chapter in its domestication, with many American cultivars believed to have arisen from chance seedlings (a rare event when a superior apple variety sprouts from seed). Settler orchards became excellent labs for new varieties and introduced fresh genetic diversity to a genetic pool that is otherwise generally frozen when the propagation of cultivars happens solely through grafting.

For the first 150 years of American apple history, farmers regarded grafting with suspicion. To take a limb from one apple tree and glue it to an alien trunk appeared to be an unnatural, even devilish act. But cloning and grafting are the only ways to grow specific apple varieties. Apple seeds are heterozygous and reproduce sexually. This means that a large portion of the apple genome preserves genetic information from both progenitors, with roughly 30 percent of the apple genome being heterozygous and of hybrid ancestry. So simply planting an apple seed will not give you the apple variety you covet. That being said, grafting apple trees is an enterprise riddled with failure—as I would find out when I started grafting to deepen my land fluency.

“As American as apple pie” would go on to become a time-honoured phrase.

Fruit-bearing trees with desirable qualities would have been vegetatively propagated—reproduced asexually—before the invention of grafting. The first fruit trees domesticated in the Old World, during the middle to late Neolithic period, appear to be the grapevine, olive, date palm, and fig. Both grape and fig can be vegetatively propagated by removing a twig by a cut and then planting it into the soil. Date palms can be propagated by transplanting shoots; for olives, cuttings suffice, though it is perhaps not the best way. Apples and other fruits in the rose family, such as cherries, pears, and plums, on the other hand, cannot be vegetatively propagated by these simple techniques, so it wasn’t until the invention of grafting that the domestication of the apple really took off.

Johnny Appleseed famously did not believe in grafting. He got away with relying on apple saplings, because in early America, when he practised his craft, apples were primarily cultivated for cider; tannic and acidic varieties were also in demand for hooch. Cider mills were everywhere, and root cellars brimmed with apples, which were also deployed for baking, drying, saucing, and blending into brandies. The first important varieties used for cider and dessert in America are from roughly 1650: the Roxbury Russet, from the Boston area, and the Rhode Island Greening, both with complex flavours that would be considered highly acidic today. America’s early economy was cash poor, and barrels of hard cider and applejack were commonly bartered, even serving as payment for the first road-building crews. The tradition of paying part of a farm labourer’s wage in cider continued in Britain until 1878, when it was made illegal.

American voters were a demanding lot: they expected to drink hard cider before going to the polls. In 1755, George Washington refused to “swill the planters with bumbo”—soften his electorate with hard cider—and lost the election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. Three years later, his campaign distributed some 150 gallons of hard cider, and he won easily.

I n the eighteenth century, apple trees were seemingly everywhere, and American orchards had an enviable diversity. Thomas Jefferson grew a whopping 170 varieties of fruit trees in his orchard at the Monticello plantation. His 1778 plan drawing with meticulous notes of his “fruitery,” as he called it, is believed to be the most detailed surviving record of an eighteenth-century American orchard. Jefferson, Washington, and Adams craved to move away from highly curated British gardens and invite at least a taste of unruly nature into their own gardens and orchards, and they all but dreamed about fruit trees.

Jefferson focused on cultivars that were ideal for cider production. He likened the Hewes Crab, with its green dotted skin and yellow flesh, to a sponge dripping with juice. The Taliaferro was “the best cyder apple existing . . . nearer to the silky Champagne than any other.” For dessert fruits, he favoured the iconic Esopus Spitzenburg, a 1790 variety from Esopus, New York, whose “aromatic flavour” improves “radically” with storage and is at its finest at Christmas, and the hardy Newtown Pippin, which is believed to be among the oldest varieties in the country, dating back to the 1750s.

I wanted to visit Jefferson’s eight-acre fruitery in Monticello to unpack how the land was his laboratory and fruit growing an essential component of his “simple farmer” image. Jefferson, of course, was a terribly complicated man. The fruit he grew depended on the labour of at least some of the roughly 130 enslaved people who, according to the Jefferson Foundation, lived and worked at Monticello at any given time—in addition to a hundred “free workmen” employed during his ownership of the plantation.

In theory, Jefferson opposed slavery—early on, he despised the system but couldn’t see a way out from an economic standpoint. He preferred to give his slaves “incentives” rather than “disincentives,” but he wasn’t above having one runaway slave flogged. After he became a widower, he went on to father kids with a slave, Sally Hemings, who was also his late wife’s half-sister; so enslaved people were literally part of his extended family. Another enslaved woman, Ursula, who nursed Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Martha, was the rare person whose skills he trusted to distill cider each year from the apples he grew. Fruit growing and cider making are undoubtedly labour intensive, and Jefferson’s fruitery, household, and wheat fields all functioned on slavery’s back.

The past isn’t always palatable and may contain seeds of what is abhorrent. In researching Jefferson’s orchard, I struggled with his slave-owning past and his relationship with Hemings. Perhaps the only way to approach the past is to do so warily, the way a teenager approaches her parents.

Washington state may have a $4 billion (US) apple industry today, but it was born on “the traditional gathering grounds and reservation lands of the Columbia River tribal peoples: the Chinook (at Fort Vancouver and the Cowlitz Farm); the Nez Perce at Alpowa (Chief Timothy’s orchard), and at Fort Simcoe (Yakama Indian Reservation),” as Mary Rose writes for the Confluence Project. Across the country, Indigenous people and African Americans laboured to sustain young orchards.

The abundance of cheap labour allowed apple orchards—and their diverse varieties—to flourish nationwide until the nineteenth century, when apple diversity began to decline. But did the loss of cheap labour contribute to this decline? If that were the case, it still wouldn’t entirely explain why thousands of apple varieties have gone extinct since the twentieth century, including Jefferson’s beloved Taliaferro. Biological factors, including the practices involved in modern monoculture orchards, may be partly to blame. In Jefferson’s era, orchards routinely grew a diversity of fruits, which was also a form of insurance against diseases that certain varieties might be susceptible to. There were no synthetic fertilizers, and orchards were instead fertilized with manure.

Jefferson favoured wild undergrowth, which encourages beneficial fungi and soil richness, whereas industrial fruit growing deploys herbicides to kill this very undergrowth. Why does undergrowth matter? The botanist Tom Antonio told me a story about Central American cacao growers who found out that their cacao flowers weren’t being pollinated. The growers eventually brought in ecologists, including Allen M. Young, to study the problem. Young found that, because there was no undergrowth left, there weren’t any places where the midges, who pollinate cacao flowers, could conduct their life cycle. One of Young’s most interesting discoveries was that adding piles of cut banana stems under the chocolate trees provided a moist refuge for the midges even during the driest weeks and helped maintain the pollinator population. He advised the growers not to obsess about on-the-ground cleanliness and let leaf litter alone. A season later, the midges made a comeback and the cacao flowers were once again fertilized.

In researching Jefferson’s orchard, I struggled with his slave-owning past.

Jefferson similarly favoured nature-centred solutions. When he read that seaweed discourages pests, he dispatched the information to the editor of a gardening journal so that fellow Virginians might also experiment with seaweed. Adams, too, was into seaweed. In a diary entry on September 5, 1796, he noted that it was “the Anniversary of The Congress in 1774” before recording how he spent the day: “Sullivan brought a good Load of green Seaweed, with six Cattle, which We spread and limed upon the heap of Compost in the Meadow. Carted Earth from the Wall to the same heap.” Adams staunchly opposed slavery and never owned slaves, and it’s refreshing to picture him working alongside a hired man to improve a compost pile. Engagement and experimentation hone our intuition about the land. Jefferson grew figs in variable areas created by stone and shade, which makes me wonder if he had an intuitive knowledge of microclimates.

Taking his apple love to heart, Jefferson was dismissive of European varieties. He wrote home from Paris, “They have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”

Benjamin Franklin was more tactful. He used the complex taste of the Newtown Pippin—a variety that I am now growing—as a diplomatic tool to win over the British. This green apple with a sunny highlight is an excellent keeper, and its tartly fresh taste grows more complex with age. The Newtown Pippin became such a smash in Britain that the country began to import it in large quantities. Later, Queen Victoria herself became a devotee. Leave it to Franklin to score an economic, political, and cultural win.

I n the eighteenth century, many of Virginia’s gentlemen farmers fervently grew apples. After leading the Revolutionary War against the British for seven long years, Washington returned home to Mount Vernon, weary of public life. He began to design the tree plantings on his estate with military fervour, not even waiting for the ground to thaw before he ordered his men to dig holes for new transplants. The next spring, many of Washington’s young trees bloomed enticingly, only to deteriorate and die. Unfazed, he and his men planted a new battalion of saplings that fall.

Once again, there can be no doubt that enslaved labour kept Washington’s garden and kitchen running. We know that toward the end of Washington’s life, his enslaved workers included three gardeners—George, Harry, and Joseph—who worked under a hired English gardener, William Spence. In his will, Washington freed the enslaved people he legally owned, including George. George’s wife, however, had come into the family through the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband and remained enslaved.

Martha liked the garden to produce a bounty of vegetables for her family and their guests. Beyond the lower kitchen, the Washingtons planted a diverse range of fruit trees, with orange trees planted, interestingly, in the ornamental garden. The family frequently hosted dinners, and it wasn’t unusual for Martha to stop by the kitchen four times a day to oversee arrangements. She had inherited thirty-eight-year-old Doll from her first husband’s estate and brought her to Mount Vernon.

Doll cooked for the Washingtons and prepared their weekly social dinners, sometimes putting in fourteen-hour days, beginning at four in the morning. The day’s main meal was served at 3 p.m. The first and second courses were meats and vegetables, and then the tablecloth was removed for the third course of nuts, raisins, and apples, served with port and Madeira wine. A wine glass in hand, Washington would hold court over the male guests while the women drifted to the living room.

As Doll grew older, she trained her daughter, Lucy, to take over as the head cook. In her sixties, Doll wove and mended like other enslaved women her age—but the Washingtons still expected her to distill “a good deal of” rosewater and mint water, in addition to preserving cherries and gooseberries. An astonishing new discovery gives a glimpse of the handiwork of Doll or a contemporary of hers. Thirty-three bottles of preserved cherries and two more bottles, possibly containing gooseberries or currants, all standing upright, were uncovered by archeologists studying an old cellar site in Mount Vernon ahead of a planned restoration. When some of the dark-green glass bottles were opened, the cherry fragments inside were found to be extremely clean and still gave off the fragrance of blossoms—some 250 years later! Whether Doll or another enslaved woman preserved the cherries, her fruit-preservation skills were exemplary.

Thousands of apple varieties have gone extinct since the twentieth century.

Knowing fruit, and what drink it yielded, was essential to living and savouring life. Adams wouldn’t dream of starting his day without a “gill” of hard cider. From his time as a Harvard undergraduate to the end of his life, he drank “refreshing and salubrious” hard cider before breakfast. He and his wife, Abigail, grew their own apples and pressed their cider on a farm in Quincy, Massachusetts. Hard cider, with British roots dating back to at least 55 BCE, was a beloved American drink, not least because it was safer than unclean or brackish drinking water. When fermented, hard cider turns into an elixir, apple cider vinegar, used as a food preservative and pickling agent to make unforgiving winters more palatable.

When travelling in the country, Adams relished tavern food, including fresh fruit. He went on to serve as the first American ambassador to Britain, but he was happiest rooting about in his garden near Boston, pulling out weeds or planting an apple tree. It says something about the kinship between him and Abigail that she once confessed to their mutual friend, Jefferson, that she preferred to tend to her garden than to participate in the doings of the British court. Before their departure from Britain, she wrote to Jefferson that she couldn’t wait to return home: “Improving my Garden has more charms for my fancy, than residing at the court of Saint James where I seldom meet with characters so inoffensive as my Hens and chickings, or minds so well improved as my Garden.”

M y heart lifts at the thought that Abigail saw her garden as a mind.

America’s founding fathers, and mothers, were passionate about apples, though they may not have known that the fruit is loaded with vitamins (notably vitamin C), fibre (pectin), minerals (including potassium), antioxidants, and flavonoids—particularly quercetin—a group of molecular compounds researchers say are beneficial in the prevention of cancer and other conditions. Adams may not have known that apples reduce bad cholesterol and the risk of strokes, but he was religious about his cider habit and saw the apple as a health-giving fruit. In his diary, he wrote, “In conformity to the fashion I drank this Morning and Yesterday Morning, about a Jill of Cyder. It seems to do me good, by diluting and dissolving the Phlegm or the Bile in the Stomach.” Preferring the cider from his own orchard to any other, he expressed in another diary entry the hope that “in the twentieth century . . . my Grand-children may live to see, an Apple-tree from a seed planted by my hand.”

I similarly wish that my girls, and their generation, will one day harvest an abundance of rich apple varieties. In our garden, which certainly has a mind of its own, the girls skip over rocks and skirt abundant cacti while glancing at Michael, my husband, and me tending to our young fruit trees, against many odds. If we can keep nourishing this soil, with some luck, we will soon be growing apple trees with our own hands.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from The Light between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild through a Beloved American Fruit by Priyanka Kumar, published by Island Press, 2025. All rights reserved.