It’s October: Finally! An apple that hasn’t been shipped halfway across the world. One full of snap and tang and juice. One chosen from an overflowing bin while the kids pick out a pumpkin and you wonder if it’s really possible to avoid having Halloween candy in the house until the day before Halloween.
If you’re like me (and I hope for your sake that you aren’t), you’ll have reached into the bin for the same apple variety you’ve loved in the past. Maybe you wished you could remember the recommendation for a new type of apple that someone in gym class told you about. Maybe you noticed just how many varieties of apple are available at a farmstand. Maybe you’ll get curious about what’s happening in apple world.
I did, and I was lucky, because I’d heard of John Bunker. Had met him, in fact, because he’s married to my friend Cammy Watts. I was doubly lucky in that he was willing to make time to visit with me despite the near-constant needs of his and Cammy’s off-the-grid homestead farm and experimental orchard, Out on a Limb Apples, in central Maine.
To talk with John Bunker is to talk past, present and future; to talk in specifics—varieties and characteristics and propagation of apples—as well as in metaphor: fruit as community and as legacy.
Referred to as a self-taught expert on heritage apples, John readily acknowledges the mentors who gave him hours of their time when he was in his twenties, teaching him about apples, about birds, and about life. Today, John and Cammy use and build on that knowledge, spending their days (depending on the season) caring for their vegetable garden, running an apple farm share, checking orchards, tracking down trees that could have historical interest, and providing information and support to the 15-to-20 small Maine nurseries currently growing trees for the mail-order business John started in 1984, Fedco Trees.
One of John’s goals when he created Fedco Trees—a division of the Maine-based cooperative seed and garden supply company, Fedco Seeds—was “to create a business that would provide inexpensive, hardy trees for people living in the north.” Another was to track down varieties other people were not offering and to propagate them.
It's this latter goal that earns John nicknames like apple explorer, apple whisperer, and Johnny Appleseed and that makes producing apples a vocation that connects history to the future.
Re-discovery of a heritage apple may begin with a sighting as John tromps through the woods in January, or it may start with a phone call from someone curious about a venerable tree producing “different looking” apples in their yard. If possible, John collects fruit from the tree and IDs it. If the tree is exceptionally old or has fruit he’s never seen before, John collects a bit of the unidentified tree and grafts it to rootstock in his orchard and then waits to see what kind of fruit is produced. Grafting is the preferred method for propagating apples, as it’s difficult to get cuttings to root and, more importantly, the seeds from a particular variety of apple won’t grow trees that produce that variety. Trust me on this: it’s genetics and has to do with the vagaries of pollination, but you won’t get MacIntosh apples if you plant a seed from a MacIntosh apple. Most of the apple varieties in John and Cammy’s orchard come from grafted trees; many of these varieties are obscure or historic or both. John, however, does plant some apple seeds, creating a genetically unique kind of apple — a piece of his work that he describes as both important and fun.
Once grafting has occurred (in the spring), there’s not much to do besides wait to find out what kind of apples are going to be produced…not much except weeding (John and Cammy don’t use herbicides); checking for signs of disease; negotiating with the coyotes, raccoons, birds, and other critters who assume the fruit is being grown for their benefit; and keeping a path cleared through the golden rod and wild raspberries and blackberry bushes that are encouraged to proliferate among the trees. Harvest begins in mid-August and continues through late October.
John first got hooked on discovering and propagating historic apples in the early 1980s, after seeing a couple of bushels of Black Oxford apples, which are a deep purple heirloom variety that’s not well known outside of Maine. John found them “spectacularly beautiful” and decided he had to learn how to graft so he could grow them. To date, he estimates he’s sold two-to-three thousand Black Oxford trees.
Currently, about 400 varieties are growing in John’s orchard. “It’s all experimental,” he says. “Maybe they have a valuable characteristic; we won’t know for years. Most of them, no one has ever heard of.
“I’m interested in the oldest of the old,” he continues. Not in producing the familiar and popular varieties, like Honeycrisp, Golden Delicious, or Gala. Not in earning enough money to buy this-or-that newest bit of technology. John’s passion, and his vocation, is uncovering and honoring the messages from the past—as written by apples—and preserving those messages for the future.
“These old trees are our collective agricultural history,” he says. “And in a place like New England, our agricultural history is our history, far more than boundary disputes and political changes.” Tracing the journey of a particular apple variety, for example, is a method of tracing human migratory history: Apples originated in central Asia but are now found pretty much everywhere, and evidence shows that humans were responsible for their spread. Within a particular region, the apples planted there—sometimes as long as two hundred years ago—indicate what characteristics were valued, leading to a greater understanding of eating habits and lifestyle.
One significant difference between today’s popular varieties and heritage apples, for example, is that most currently available apples are “dessert” apples, intended to be eaten fresh and, hopefully, to both ship well and store well. Historically, however, when people had to rely on what was locally available and had to preserve food to get them through the winter months, “Each apple” as John says, “had its own best use.” There were pie apples, cider apples, apples for sauce and apples for apple butter. “People selected the best, named them, passed them around to their neighbors for generations,” he continues. They became, in short, an integral part of the community.
Apple trees also function as branches, if you will, that extend through time. “Someone planted that old tree for you,” John says. “They may not know you, but they did this really cool thing for us so very long ago.” Apples, according to John, are also models for how we might live in the present: “One of the wonderful things about old apple trees is that they are apolitical, nondenominational, and multi-racial. They don’t care about the fabricated human divisions that we have made and that we bicker about endlessly. They feed anyone who comes along. They are like a model for how the world ought to work.”
John sees apples connecting him…and all of us…to the future as well as to the past. “When you graft an apple tree, you use the scion (wood from the new tree) - it’s like a baton - and you graft it on the young tree that’s going to live, and it can live for 100 years or more.” He sees his mentors—the people who spent countless hours passing on lessons about life, farming, or living off the grid—as people who passed the baton to him. Now he wants to ensure that he passes the baton on to the future.
“It’s not up to me to convince people to live a certain way,” he clarifies. “But I want to put it out there, so those who think it’s important can get the information they need, the way I did.”
Talk of the future brought up the future of apples as the climate changes. While many of the farmers I’ve spoken with say the climate is always changing and so don’t cite specifics, John has seen some significant changes over the fifty-two years he’s been living in rural Maine. In 1972, winters were predictably snowy and cold. Last year, there was no snow to speak of. “Now we get rain when we didn’t used to,” he continues. “We get drought when we didn’t used to.” Because spring is warmer than it has been historically, the apple trees bloom earlier, and then can be hit by a late frost, which kills the blossoms, thereby reducing or eliminating the crop.
Changes in weather have brought new threats, including fire blight, a form of bacteria. A decade ago, fire blight wasn’t a problem in Maine. Now, says John, it’s the number one fear of all Maine apple growers. The bacteria behind fire blight grows more quickly in warmer weather and grows fastest between 80°F and 95°F. Historically, 80°F was considered a high in central Maine and 95°F was virtually unheard of. Not anymore: A June 2024 study by the Maine Climate Council’s Scientific and Technical Subcommittee found that 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 all ranked among the ten warmest years on record in Maine.
“No one knows what apples should be grown or can be grown in the future,” John says. “One of the reasons why maintaining a super diverse apple population is so valuable is that we can hope that somewhere in this vast genetic diversity will be apples that can figure out how to live in the future.”
His prediction: that hardiness will be a critical feature. For apples, and for all of us.
You can now preorder my forthcoming climate novel, Little Great Island (Sibylline Press, May 6, 2025) through amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, or if you prefer shopping indie, go to bookshop.org and select “choose a bookstore” to select your favorite bookstore. Check out my website katewoodworth.com for more information.
Fascinating read, Kate. I'm glad you are using this forum. I'll never look at apples in quite the same way - thanks for the education. And yes - may we all find the hardiness to survive changing times.