Research-centric orchards chart the apple’s future

Imagine reaching up to a tree branch and plucking an apple that’s unusually tall and narrow — a variety called Kandil Sinap, native to the Black Sea region. In an adjacent arboreal row, 11 trees to the north, you’ll find the equally exotic dark purple Black Oxford apples, resembling large plums. Add 1,000-plus varieties of the fruit genus Malus, which is bursting with an autumn-themed rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green and even purple, to this scene, and you’re in the Apple Biodiversity Collection in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia.

The apples won’t end up in pies or the baskets of autumn leaf peepers. Instead, scientists there are working on understanding the genetics that result in this bonanza of apple diversity, with the ultimate goal of improving the fruit in different ways — tastier, heartier, more disease-resistant and with longer shelf-life in the face of changing climates. “It’s tremendous to be able to walk through what is essentially the United Nations of apples and see the world’s genetic diversity all in one place,” said Sean Myles, who started the orchard in 2011, “and that feeling is quickly replaced with a tremendous urgency to get all this work done.”

You might not realise it, but many popular apples in grocery stores in recent years — Cosmic Crisps from Washington state, SnapDragons from New York and Honeycrisps, originally from Minnesota — originated with the efforts of scientists examining the qualities of different apple types and crossbreeding them. With some 7,500 varieties of apple in the world, there’s plenty to discover. Future generations of apples in grocery stores may come from research orchards like the one in Nova Scotia, which is among the newest.

Myles did not start out as an apple genes aficionado — he has an allergy to raw apples, which make his mouth itch unless they’re cooked. He had previously worked on human genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Rather than a love of the fruit, his love of his now-wife prompted a move to the Annapolis Valley, where she makes wine. As the region’s main crop was apples, Myles got into the business of apple genes. He joined Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Agriculture and got a Canada Research Chair position with funding to start the Apple Biodiversity Collection.

There is no global census of all efforts to preserve apple diversity. A 2019 report published by the Global Crop Diversity Trust found 40 apple diversity collections around the world, with seven established during the 21st century, but because it was not a complete list, the Nova Scotia orchard was not included. The report also notes that more than half of the 40 surveyed orchards are in North America or Europe. Only three are in Central Asia and the Caucasus, where scientists believe many contemporary apple varieties originated.

To ensure greater security of long-term conservation of the world’s apple diversity, the report calls for a global organisation of those who cultivate these collections. But today, “we are certainly a long way away from having any sort of international coordination of apple diversity maintenance,” Myles said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture manages the country’s most diverse apple collection in Geneva, New York, which is also among the world’s largest, said Ben Gutierrez, the collection’s curator (the site includes grapes and cherries, too). Most of the more than 5,000 apple varieties are planted in an orchard across 30 acres. Tissue from each kind of apple is stored in a giant freezer so that if weather or disease harms a particular tree, researchers can reintroduce that variety to the orchard.