Tom Brown, a 79-year-old retired chemical engineer began his quest to find and preserve lost apple varieties around more than 20 years ago. The man who owns an apple orchard called Heritage Apples in Clemmons, North Carolina, USA has re-discovered over 1000 rare varieties of apples. His Heritage Apples showcase at least 600 of them. He has been working so that the heirloom apples of Appalachia in the Eastern United States do not disappear with time.
The Beginning
In a historic farmer’s market, Tom Brown was introduced to “heritage apples”, some near extinct Apple Trees that have been preserved by earlier generations because of their unique traits and reliability, around 2 decades ago. He saw apples coloured sunset pink, dark green, and even purple-black. Their names he had never heard before – Bitter Buckingham, Jonathans, Arkansas Black, Billy Sparks Sweetening and more.
The interesting set of new flavours guided him to a conversation with a vendor there, orchardist Maurice Marshall. The apples he was selling were a common thing in the 18th and 19th century, however, they disappeared from the markets in the late 1940s. Inspired by Marshall’s work of obtaining these supposedly lost apple species from elderly mountain dwellers, he thought it would be “neat” to find apples nobody had tasted in 50 years or a century. Thus, Tom dived into what he decided would be his retirement hobby: hunting lost apples.
The Process
Brown learnt the science of identifying, cloning, grafting, and maintaining apple trees from small scale orchardists. He started collecting the information about old orchards, fruit-grower association and letters, names of former owners and workers and rumours about heritage trees that still existed. He, along with his wife Merrikay have driven for long journeys to search hidden orchards in the area. Whenever he hears about an old, unusual apples, he goes to the locations and checks them out. If he visits in the non-harvesting season, he waits patiently and goes back when the apples are ripe. Or he takes a branch, grafts it and waits for its fruiting season. When he has seen and tasted the apples, he confirms with pictures, verbal descriptions or catalog entries to make sure it is that particular apple he was seeking.
The man and his passion
For Tom, finding old apples is the joy of knowing he is helping preserve the land’s agriculture heritage. To trace heritage apple varieties, he prefers to go all the way back, putting all necessary efforts to reach the original locations of an apple tree and identifying it. He believes in speaking to present generations of apple farmers, understanding their heritage and the emotions towards these fruits that their great-grandparents grew and valued.
His passion drove him to contacting people, even visiting homes of strangers to inquire about apples. In order to gather more clues, he started putting ads in local newspapers.
By 2003-2004, he had started a website to put up pictures of the apples he had found. He added his contact to the website and continued to grow his community. Today, with the numerous descriptions of apples he receives on the Net, he accumulates a general idea about the textures and colours of different species that eases his work to an extent. His passion has driven him to dig up old property records to get in touch with original growers of certain species. He even plans on writing them letters for communication. Tom Brown keeps huge records of literature to help him find a reasonable identification process as well.
The Apple Hunter
Popularly known as the Apple-Hunter, Tom grows around 60 varieties of apples each year on his farm and sells around 1000 trees. To encourage more preservation, Brown offers to discounts on the purchase of rarer heritage varieties. Trees from Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and a few other places have found their forever homes in his orchard. Chef Travis Milton, Cider maker Diane Flynt, Anna Drowzdoska and hundreds of native people recognise the work that Tom has done and feel grateful for the new flavours they got to work on. Finding a new plant-restorer is being cherished across the globe.
For Tom Brown saving an apple from the brink of extinction is a passion. For the world, it is the preservation of a lost Heritage!
