The Wild Apples of the Tian Shan Mountains
Here is a brief history of the origin of modern apples and some info on why preserving the original wild apple genetics is important.
Nikolai Vavilov, a Soviet-era botanist studied the origin of the apple, and concluded that the domestic apple (Malus domestica) had evolved from a species of wild apple (Malus siversii), endemic to Southern Kazakhstan. That theory that all domestic apples originate from the mountains in southern Kazakhstan has since been confirmed by modern genetics.
In the Tien Shan Mountain range of Kazakhstan there are wild apple forests. In these forests, no two trees produce identically flavored apples. The interesting thing about Malus siverssii is that unlike many other wild trees, the fruits from one tree are completely different from the next — the flavors are remarkably diverse. Some fruit are said to have a flavor reminiscent of wine, through apricot to bitter lemon or rhubarb. Tastes are said to range in intensity through notes of sweet, sour, and bitter. The texture could be anywhere from crunchy to mealy, and the size anywhere between a cherry and a tennis ball.
Some theorize that Ice Age-era humans would have been quick to recognize this kind of culinary paradise, as some early humans left their marks in the form of seemingly ritualistic petroglyphs on rocks throughout the valleys. One can imagine them sitting under one of these trees feasting on the apples, and where they threw the core or deposit humanure after eating the seed, another tree would grow. After generations of always eating the sweetest and biggest fruit and then unintentionally sowing the seeds, the fruit changed, got reliably bigger and sweeter, closer to the apples we are familiar with today.
Though in my opinion the story of how the apple made it from a remote mountain to your garden or orchard has as much to do with birds, boars, deer, bears and horses as it does with primitive humans or nomads. Birds are thought to have carried the seeds of an early apple from China to Kazakhstan, where the Tien Shan brown bear fell in love with them. Bears like big, juicy apples and will hack their way through a tree to get the best fruit, pruning the trees as they go. They poop out the seeds in a perfect germination package.
Thus it is thought that a key element in the selection and breeding of apples has been bears. The bears always choose to eat the sweetest apples, and at the time of ripening, gorge themselves on the fruit before a long winter in hibernation. The seeds pass through the bears unharmed, and more apple trees with preferential genes are propagated in spring.
Bears don’t roam a great deal, but horses do, and Kazakhstan was one of the first places where they were domesticated. Horses love apples, and distribute the bear-selected apples far and wide. Horses — which were first domesticated in Kazakhstan for riding and milk facilitating great journeys along the Silk Road, dispersed the seeds all along their way.
From Kazakhstan, the seeds of many types of apples were dropped by traders along the Silk Road to Asia and to Europe, and eventually made their way to North America with the early colonists who planted apple orchards, spreading the apple genes throughout the northeast, and eventually all throughout the U.S. and Canada.
But apples, like humans, do not produce carbon copies of themselves in their seeds, so each seed in an apple is as different from another seed in that same apple or from another seed in an apple on the same tree, as children are different from each other and from their parents.
Here is where the problem with modern apples arises, along the way from the Tian Shan Mountains to our backyards apple trees lost something essential: genetic diversity.
The almost complete dependence of modern apple cultivation on grafting to root stock for uniform and reliable fruit production is the cause of the problem.
“Most of the apple trees in the world are planted on M.9 rootstock,” says Gennaro Fazio, a plant geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. “They’re clones of a tree that grew in the 17th century. That’s ancient technology.”
Rootstocks are used in grafting when the branch of a desirable fruit tree is spliced into the trunk of another. M.9 is used to dwarf, or shrink, the size of a fruit tree. A Gala, Fuji, or Red Delicious grown from seed will become tall and unmanageable, but if you graft their scions (branches) onto M.9 rootstock, the resulting tree will be only one-third the height. This results in a smaller canopy that allows more sunshine through, creating better and more consistent apples on each tree. And the lower height makes for more efficient harvesting.
The term M.9 is short for Malling 9, a code given to the rootstock in 1912 when it was officially cataloged at the East Malling Research Station in Kent, England.
What those early botanists were doing, unknowingly, was narrowing the apple tree’s genetic pool to the point where a mutation occurred. In this case, in the form of a the M.9’s shrimpy size. That process also eliminated genes that helped the tree fight pests and diseases.
While M.9’s adaptation and evolution was stopped in time (the moment humans began grafting onto root-stock) Mother Nature and all her ‘pests’ and disease pressures kept on developing ways to attack it.
The result is that today’s M.9 rootstocks are vulnerable to an array of maladies, such as fire blight, woolly apple aphid, and cedar apple rust.
The disease that really concerns Fazio is replant disease. Wherever multiple generations of M.9 have been replanted, the rootstock is attacked from something in the soil. Scientists don’t fully understand why.
“That’s not a problem for sieversii,” Fazio says. “They’ve been replanting themselves in the wild for thousands of years. That’s a trait we want to get back.”
Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire.) wrote “the story of the modern apple, which has become utterly dependent on us to keep its natural enemies at bay, suggests that domestication can be overdone.”
These are some of the reasons why I have decided to try and grow some wild apple trees (and hopefully some day) be able to save seed and continue scaling up the wild apple tree numbers here in Canada. These ancient wild apples are a living genetic database that contains the potential for countless new apple varieties to be developed that would be resilient to pest and disease pressures and offer a wide diversity in flavor, nutrition and form.
I am grateful to have managed to secure some Malus sieversii seeds from southern Kazakhstan. The seeds germinated and grew many seedlings which contain the genetic essence of the original apple progenitor (“the father of all apples”). We now have three 2 year old trees and several first year trees going.
Of course the chance that the couple of Malus sieversii trees I plan on growing will produce fruit that is delicious is quite low.. but even if they aren’t tasty or pretty they will never the less be nutritious and also produce seed I can save and share serving to protect and carry on the ancient lineage of the wild apple. Wish me luck!
