Apples

The domesticated apple traces back to Malus sieversii, a wild apple species still found growing in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. Apples spread west along the Silk Road, eventually reaching Europe and, with colonization, North America.

Nearly every apple variety grown today is a graft, not a seedling — apples don't reliably reproduce true from seed, so every "Honeycrisp" or "McIntosh" tree in the world is a genetic clone, propagated by grafting cuttings onto rootstock.

A striking number of major American apple varieties were quite literally accidents. McIntosh began in 1811 when John McIntosh, clearing land in Ontario, found wild seedlings and transplanted one that survived. Golden Delicious was found on Anderson Mullins's farm in West Virginia, sold to Stark Brothers Nursery for $5,000 in 1914. Granny Smith began as a chance seedling Maria Ann Smith discovered near a creek on her Australian property in 1868.

Honeycrisp has one of the more remarkable modern stories: the original tree, bred at the University of Minnesota in 1960, was badly winter-damaged in 1976–77 and written off as a failure, surviving only by accident through a few forgotten propagated clones. Breeder David Bedford rediscovered one in 1982 while reviewing trees marked for termination.

Duchess of Oldenburg, one of four Russian apples imported to Massachusetts in 1835 for cold-hardy stock, turned out to have an outsized hidden legacy: DNA analysis found it in the ancestry of 27 of the 28 cultivars ever released by the University of Minnesota's breeding program, including both Wealthy and Honeycrisp.

Thomas Jefferson grew Esopus Spitzenburg and Newtown Pippin at Monticello, and Benjamin Franklin, while living in London in 1759, wrote home asking his wife to send him Newtown Pippins. Cox's Orange Pippin, widely considered one of the finest-flavored English apples ever raised, was grown from seed around 1825–1830 by Richard Cox, a retired brewer, in Buckinghamshire.