[Sca-cooks] On apples

[Drew Shiel]

On 22 October 2015 at 00:32, Lijsbet de Keukere <
lijsbet.vandelfthout at gmail.com> wrote:


> Someone new to my barony lives on land that was once a cider orchard, and
> many of the trees are still standing. The variety, they say, is Malus
> sylvestris, which, if I'm looking in the right places, is a wild crab apple
> originating in Northern Europe. [...] One of the prime characteristics of
> these apple trees is its spiny
> nature - there are large, sharp spines that stick out from the branches. I
> cannot seem to find a resource that mentions the history of the spiny
> version of this crab apple, unless of course, it is simply implied. It is
> just unique enough that I wondered if it was its own variety which
> warranted a closer look.
>

  Malus sylvestris does indeed have thorns, often lots of thorns[1]. Left
to its own devices, it also develops lots of trunks, in such density that
the central ones often die off for lack of light. It's rare enough these
days; it's not cultivated, and most of the wild specimens have been cut
down or otherwise disposed of. I knew of two such trees near my homeplace
in Co. Wexford, Ireland, when I was growing up, and both are now gone - one
lost to land clearance for a house, the other not surviving repeated
hedge-cuttings.

 At this stage, if I found such a tree, I'd see about taking cuttings with
an eye to grafting them - not that I've done so before, but my grandfather
used to graft trees, so I've seen it done. Apple trees very rarely breed
true; the pips in the apple are almost by definition crossbreeds, and
that's going to be all the more true in an orchard.

  But having found a European crab apple in America seems like something of
a prize in and of itself, so congratulations!

  Le meas,
  Aodh

  [1] On the old trees I knew of, these were not 'minor inconvenience'
thorns as on brambles, nor 'painful but dealable with' thorns as on roses.
These were great big two-to-four inch spikes, like blackthorn but even
bigger, that were a danger to life and limb. I still have a sizable scar on
my temple, just at the hairline, from where one of them gouged me.

-- 
http://about.me/drewshiel
"Luck affects everything. Let your hook always be cast; in the stream where
you least expect it there will be a fish." -- Ovid.