At Islesboro Central School, high school students are learning about Tollman’s Sweet, Yellow Bell Flower, Fameuse, Astrichan, Roxbury Russet and several other varieties of apples unfamiliar to most people.
The students have found trees on the island bearing these identifiable apples, plus a couple of so far unidentified varieties that John Bunker, an apple expert, says may be unique to the island.
Some of the 20 or so varieties that have already been identified by Bunker, who established the Maine Apple Orchard at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association’s Common Ground Education Center, are known to date back to Colonial days.
“Roxbury Russet, which dates from 1630, is one of the first names in American varieties,” he says, adding that it, like Yellow Bell Flower, will keep all winter if stored in the basement. Baldwin, he says, dates from a bit later, probably the 1700s, as does Tollman’s Sweet. Fameuse, or Snow, so named for its pure white flesh, originated in Canada more than 200 years ago. Another variety he identified on Islesboro, Red Astrichan, was imported to the United States in the early 19th century from Russia. “It’s an extremely popular summer apple grown up and down the Maine Coast,” he says. “Very tart.”
Part of the students’ mission is to learn how these varieties happened to land on Islesboro. The students have been working with horticulture teacher John Pincince to locate, identify and preserve some of the island’s oldest or otherwise endangered apple varieties, a project that is intertwined with the Orchard Project established by Pincince’s horticulture class, which has been running for six years.
Students are also locating pear and other fruit trees on the island. They are sure to discover additional apple varieties on the island, as Bunker says there are close to 300 that have been identified in Maine (some of them newer types). He adds that some island trees could be 150 to 200 years old. “As long as they have been pruned at least occasionally,” he notes, “they will continue to produce fruit.” (As a side point of information, he urges people with old trees no longer giving fruit not to abandon them, but to prune. Fruit grows only on new wood, he says.)
To pinpoint apple orchards and individual trees and to learn about the history of apple husbandry and use on the island, students have been utilizing skills learned through the CREST (Community for Rural Education Stewardship and Technology), which is funded by a grant won by the Island Institute from the National Science Foundation for 11 Maine coastal and island schools. The program encourages Maine students to use technology to find creative solutions to community challenges. It provides training in GPS/GIS, digital story telling, ethnographic research skills and web page design.
The students’ first task has been to find orchards and individual trees across the island and record their locations with handheld GPS (global positioning system) units. These points are downloaded onto a computer at the school. Ultimately, the data will be part of an island map showing tree locations, identifies each and has overlays that include the type of soil where they are growing, topography of the site and property boundaries.
Once students have identified trees that are either favorites for a particular use or are endangered for some reason such as storm damage or deterioration from age, they will help Pincince obtain a piece of the tree (scion wood) to graft onto another healthy tree (root stock) in the school’s orchard. Flowers will be picked from the scion wood so it can grow and gain strength for two years before its fruit is harvested.
Often, Pincince says, a resident will simply know that a particular tree on her property or nearby made especially good apple pies, but doesn’t know the name of the variety. “They know what they like,” he says, “and part of our process is to uncover folks who do know the location of special trees.”
Pincince says island residents have already called on the horticulture class students to help save trees. “A woman called in November who was concerned about a Wolf River tree that had fallen over on the property of people she works for,” he explains. “She was very keen on us doing what we could to save it. She said it made the best apple pie she’s ever made.” In February or March, when the tree is dormant, Pincince will take students to collect scion wood from the tree. Later, they will graft it onto other trees on the property and onto root stock at the school orchard. In another instance, Pincince says they found a tree with fruit that had a superior taste with a pear-like flavor. “It was quite old,” he says. “We collected scion wood and grafted it onto some rootstock in the orchard, and then last year, that tree fell over in a storm. That’s why we’re doing what we are.”
Science teacher Lori Safford’s seventh grade students are beginning a series of camcorder interviews with older island residents to learn about their youth, including if fruit was an important part of their diet; the history of their property and the location of fruit trees on the property. They will also ask the residents for any information they can give about the variety of apples and if they know who planted or grafted the trees on their property. They hope to find out residents’ favorite uses for various fruit trees, both their own and perhaps others on the island. These interviews will be edited by students, saved on DVDs and ultimately, be available as part of a larger documentary that is planned for the school’s CREST web site. “It’s wonderful,” notes Safford, “how so many teachers are working together on this. It creates a real sense of the school as community.”
An 11th grade student, Olivia Boucher, used a CREST digital camcorder to interview food writer and historian Sandy Oliver last summer. “It was quite interesting,” she says, “to hear from her about how Johnny Appleseed set up his apple orchards, that having a certain amount of acres of apple trees was like heaven for people in those days, like home security.”
Boucher took the 30-minute interview with her to the CREST summer institute, and with help from Mike Kimball, assistant professor of anthropology at University of Maine at Machias, used IMovie to edit the footage down to a two-minute clip. She also interviewed Pincince and is working on editing that footage down.
Before attending the CREST summer institutes for the past two years, Boucher says she had had some experience using a video camera, but none with IMovie. “The CREST program has taught me a lot more about using the digital camera to take movie footage and editing with IMovie plus using GPS and GIS to graph points and make maps, and how to design web sites,” she says. Although she is currently too busy with other work to participate in the horticulture class (work that includes using CREST web design for several classes), she is committed to helping finish the orchard map in the spring and to finalizing a horticulture web site she is designing for the school. “I’ve gone over lots and lots of plans for the web site,” she says,” but I’m not quite happy with it yet. There’s a lot more work to do before I graduate. Hopefully, after that, it will be maintained by other students.”
Oliver echoes that sentiment regarding the Apple Orchard project and the plans to graft scion wood from trees scattered across the island. “John is our only hope for preserving them,” she says. She hopes that before the students who are currently involved in the project graduate, they will have created a permanent repository of the island’s favorite varieties.