The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
New life from old on Heron Road
It is the season of cutting scions.
A time of year when grafters make young trees from old.
Raven Jackman has clipped all the young shoots she can reach on the dying yellow transparent apple tree beside a decaying farmhouse on Heron Road.
So the 76-year-old who lives alone with 20 rescued horses on an old Pictou County farmstead is asking those who come to give her tree new life to first contemplate whether they're willing to climb it.
Or that they bring a stepladder.
“I'd just like for it to continue,” said Jackson.
“Even if it's somewhere else.”
It's not really her tree.
It's actually a clone of one that grew from seed around 1850 in an orchard in Tzarist Russia.
Someone noticed it fruited earlier than all the other trees.
While this wild tree's pale yellow fruit only kept fresh two or three days (make that weeks in a refrigerator) it had a fine texture and gentle flavour.
With a small knife that person would have cut sections of first year growth off the tree in the spring. Then he or she would have carefully pared the cutting (known as a scion) to expose the thin living green layer just underneath the bark known as the cambium.
Then they would have either made a matching cut in an existing tree or on a piece of root to create a new tree.
That new tree, however, was actually still the old tree.
Like all the apple varieties grown in yards and orchards, it is a clone.
It has to be because a seed from an apple won't produce a tree that grows the same or produces the same fruit as its parent.
So every apple we eat is the gift of countless careful sets of hands that have chosen and replicated a variety through the generations that have passed since the first apple trees were propagated outside their native range in what is now Kazakhstan.
“Growing up for many of us it would have been the first fresh apple we would have had for a long time,” said Jackson.
Sobeys may have been born in Pictou County but when Jackson was a child it wasn't importing fresh fruit outside of the local season from California.
Those of Jackson's generation know their apple varieties in a way most younger folk don't.
They associate them with the seasons they lived by.
So a yellow transparent is not just an apple to Jackson.
It's being a girl sent with your siblings to run out into your mother's front yard where she could could watch you pick the season's first fruit.
It was the pies, soft apple sauce and apple butter that followed as the bountiful harvest from one tree was quickly processed before it went bad.
America was crazy for apples in the 1800s.
The United States Department of Agriculture had a team of full-time water colourists whose job was just to paint apples. Not paint the fruit themselves, but rather to create books showing the varied characteristics of the hundreds of popular varieties.
That department heard about this new Russian apple and sent for cuttings.
They crossed the broad Atlantic under sail and were immediately grafted, propagated and spread.
“The earliest of all apples; handsome and good,” reads the 1888 edition of the Minnesota Horticulture Society's annual report.
“Like all Russian apples, of ironclad hardiness … Fruit growers in New Jersey who have this apple in bearing are realizing immense profits from it.”
In cold Minnesota they loved it in part because it survived.
Jackson told her husband in 1980 that if he was going to move her and their three children home from Alberta where he worked in the oil patch, the property he bought had to have either a barn or a house.
“We could build one or the other, but not both,” said Jackson.
"And it had to have access to lots of good water too."
The property he settled on had a century-and-a-half-old farmhouse.
The barns were gone. The owner, a man from British Columbia who'd made some questionable renovations in an attempt to make it resemble a Swiss chalet, packed his personal belongings and left the furniture, dishes and cutlery.
When the old tree in her front yard produced fruit early in her first August on the Heron Road, Jackson recognized it as a childhood friend.
On the property she raised horses and children, taking in some 50 foster children and adopting two of them.
“I loved teenagers,” said Jackson.
The tree in front of the house marked each season with advance notice that long summers will give way to fall harvests.
Her husband died more than 20 years ago now.
The old house became too much maintenance and she's moved to a bungalow next door.
Her own scions have all moved off to work and raise families around the country. The tree remains for now. As do the rescue horses. There's a dedidcated team of volunteers who come and help in her quest to allow the animals to live out their natural lives.
She'll remain, too.
She bridled subtly when a young reporter had the temerity to ask Monday if she might be finding the farm a handful.
“It might be for you,” she said.