William Halsall, Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor (1882)

In 1620, Separatists from England (otherwise known as the Pilgrims) arrived in what would become the United States aboard the Mayflower. The onboard menu was far less attractive than what draws travelers to the cruise buffet lines today – hard biscuits, salt pork, dried meats, oatmeal, fish, and a few pickled things. The Pilgrims were not the somber kill joys we tend think of them as – the ship also included stores of alcohol (legend has it that the Pilgrims only stopped in Massachusetts because the beer was running low and not because they actually wanted to settle on Cape Cod) as well as apple seeds for growing the fruit that would make hard cider. The Pilgrims shared a widespread belief that water was unwholesome and dangerous and so preferred to drink the fruits of fermentation.

Like the horses that carried apples overland, ships carried apples overseas. European explorers and colonists brought favorite apple varieties with them to the New World. Some of the first colonists tried planting grafted Old World apple trees but most did not fare well in their new environment. Fortunately, they also planted seeds, which tended to do better. As people moved further inland, they took their apples with them, establishing orchards in the Midwest and on the Pacific coast by the late 19th century.

Apples also traveled to South America with Spanish and Portuguese explorers. The apple trees became so thick and vigorous that by the time Charles Darwin landed in Chile in 1835, he claimed to have nearly missed the Chilean port of Valdivia for the tangle of foliage and fruit.

Apples arrived in Australia in 1788 when Captain Arthur Phillip established the English colony of Port Jackson (today’s Sydney). And the infamous Captain Bligh had a soft spot for plants, sending the Bounty’s  botanist to plant apple seedlings on the coast of Tasmania.

In 1862, writer Henry David Thoreau praised the apple’s sea legs, declaring that the apple “emulates man’s independence and enterprise. It is not simply carried… but like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this New World.”

apple seeds
Source: Aka

I know what you’re thinking – “seeds aren’t made by humans! This isn’t an object as defined by the rules of this game!” Yes, yes, I know. But we’re looking at seeds to talk about something humans do to (deliciously) interfere with the reproduction of apples: grafting.

Apples, like humans, produce offspring that can be radically different from the parent plants. They are heterozygous. This means that left alone, an apple tree will produce hundred of seedlings each a little (or a lot) different than the other. This genetic diversity allowed the apple to spread through the temperate regions of the world since at least one of those seeds had what it took to survive in new conditions. The only way to ensure that you get the same type of apple is by grafting.

Humans have been grafting plants for thousands of years, and apples may have been one of the first grafted fruits. To graft a plant, growers attach the root of one tree to the shoot of the desired fruit to clone it. It’s the only way to get reliable apple quality and consistent fruit.

The Persians, Greeks, and Romans each used grafting to produce favorite apple varieties. The Romans had at least twenty-four cultivated apple varieties, one of which, the Lady Apple, is still commonly grown and is one of the oldest known fruit varieties. It isn’t often you can get a real taste of the past, particularly one that dates back to ancient Rome.