McIntosh

McIntosh had come to this cold and unforgiving country in 1796 from the friendly, civilized region of the Mohawk Valley, fleeing family disdain for the unforgivable sin of falling in love with an unacceptable mate. He had settled on land near the town of Iroquois on the St. Lawrence River, but now the woman who had caused such upheaval in his life was gone and he was several miles further north, married to Hannah Doran and trying to tame the land he had traded with her brother. Only one-quarter of an acre of this so-called farm had ever been cleared and even that section of the wilderness had grown up again, the young trees towering above his head. But in amongst them, he kept coming upon little seedlings, strong and youthful, and decidedly unlike the others. Apples, thought John McIntosh, apples growing in the Canadian bush? He spared them. About a dozen seedlings were soon transplanted to his garden nearby. By the following year all but one had died. He nursed it and it slowly grew. When it bore fruit, red-blushed and round, he tasted it, tart on the tongue. Today the McIntosh is produced in greater quantities than any other apple in Canada and the north-eastern United States, and is grown in orchards around the world. Every tree, and therefore every McIntosh apple that has ever been eaten or put into a pie or into juice or cider, is a direct descendant of that little seedling that mysteriously appeared in the Canadian woods and tenaciously clung to life. It was, when John McIntosh found it, the first and the only one of its kind in the world. To this day no one is certain how it got there. The way in which apples reproduce when unchecked by human interference creates much of the mystery. Apple trees are not “self-fruitful”; in other words, the seeds within their apples will not reproduce the same variety as the parent tree. Only by grafting a variety onto the trunk of another tree can that variety be maintained. The orphan that McIntosh found in the bush that day, likely grown from seeds of an apple core tossed on the ground by a passerby, was naturally cross-pollinated, an offspring of unknown ancestors. The apple most often theorized as a parent is the Fameuse, known in English Canada as the Snow. This is based on several common characteristics and the Fameuse’s popularity in Quebec before 1811. There were no apples (other than crab) in North America prior to the appearance of Europeans; by the seventeenth century they had made their way westward with settlers and it would make sense that travelling Quebecers, moving through the woods around Matilda Township, 95 kilometres west of their border, would be carrying Fameuse apples. But in 1970 W.H. Upshall of the Horticultural Experiment Station at Vineland, Ontario, maintained that trials with the Fameuse as progenitor had not been successful, and suggested Fall St. Lawrence and the Alexander as potential forebears. This is contrary to conclusions drawn by other experts, like Roger Yepsen, who unequivocally stated in his 1994 book Apples , that the McIntosh is “a talented cross between Fameuse and Detroit Red.” More than 80 years earlier The Canadian Apple Growers’ Guide had hedged its bets, simply calling the Mac, “of Fameuse type.” So the mystery of the McIntosh, probed only by educated guesses, remains. John McIntosh likely cared little about where his wonderful new apple tree came from — all he knew was that he had to reproduce it. But his experiments with seeds kept giving him other varieties. His one tree remained, ready to disappear from history should it be destroyed. A century and a half later Olive McIntosh, widow of John’s great-grandson, sits in her home in Morrisburg, Ontario, not far from the Dundela homestead where she once lived. She opens an old wooden box filled with family heirlooms, the greatest of which should be a national treasure: a chunk of the original McIntosh tree. Setting it on the kitchen table, she explains how John solved the rep