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An old apple tree on Verona Island, Maine, looked close to collapse. Its trunk was almost hollow, its body leaned sideways, and no one knew what kind of fruit it produced. Yet the tree was still alive, still bearing chartreuse-yellow apples under a rusty web of skin—and, as Maryn McKenna recounts, still holding evidence that could revise both agricultural history and the future of apple breeding.

The investigation that identified it joined amateur fruit detectives, homeowners, historians and geneticists across two continents. Their discovery was more than a satisfying answer to a botanical mystery. The tree proved to be a surviving copy of a long-lost European cultivar and a genetic ancestor of hundreds of American apples. Its story shows how living organisms can preserve a record that documents alone cannot, and why recovering forgotten crop diversity matters in an era of disease and climate stress.

A fragile crop with a narrow foundation

Apples grown from seeds do not reproduce their parents exactly. Each seed combines genes from two cross-pollinated trees, creating an unpredictable mixture of traits. To preserve a favored variety, growers instead clone it by grafting a twig onto another tree’s rootstock. Repeated grafting can carry the same genetic individual across centuries, long after the people who named and valued it have disappeared.

That continuity is increasingly important. About 2,500 apple varieties exist in the United States, and roughly 100 are grown commercially, but just 15 dominate the market. Such genetic concentration makes orchards easier targets for fire blight, powdery mildew, scab and other diseases. Changing weather compounds the danger by favoring pathogens and pulling flowering and temperature cycles out of alignment; a 2021 heat wave destroyed more than 2 percent of Washington State’s crop.

Old trees may contain traits for disease resistance, hardiness, flavor or drought tolerance that commercial breeding left behind. Tree-fruit geneticist Cameron Peace therefore uses DNA profiles to build a family tree of North American apples and to trace useful characteristics through generations. Historic varieties are not merely collectibles. If they have survived decades of neglect, freezing winters and drought, their genomes may hold tools for developing more resilient fruit.

Detectives in orchards and archives

The Maine mystery began with John Bunker, who taught himself to identify obscure local apples by details such as skin color, stem depth, bark and the arrangement of seed cells. He founded a nursery, helped establish the Maine Heritage Orchard and spent decades listening to family stories and inspecting abandoned farms. At a 2007 garden-club gathering on Jeanne and Ron Russell’s Verona Island property, he mapped about two dozen trees. He recognized several but labeled one ancient specimen simply “unknown,” then put the map away for years.

Historian Todd Little-Siebold approached the same landscape through records. Colonial Maine had belonged to New France before Britain took control in 1763, and old orchards contained French cultivars that did not fit the usual English-centered account of New England settlement. Nursery catalogs, diaries, deeds and agricultural censuses helped reconstruct that overlooked history, but names and descriptions were subjective. DNA could provide evidence where written archives stopped.

After Peace offered genetic fingerprinting to the Maine Heritage Orchard, the group returned to the Russells’ tree and mailed him a few budding leaves. In 2023 its DNA profile produced an astonishing match—not to a named North American sample, but to an empty position that genetic analysis had predicted should exist. The tree was an “unknown founder,” a missing parent or grandparent whose genetic segments survived in many later cultivars. The Verona Island tree was the first living North American specimen to fill that place in the pedigree.

The comparison relies on single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs: locations where one DNA letter differs among individuals. A small SNP panel can screen for known identities, and larger panels can establish finer relationships. Breeders can also link these markers to qualities such as acidity, aroma, texture and disease resistance. This does not directly edit an apple’s genome. It makes traditional crossing more efficient by letting breeders test seedlings for desired inherited traits long before mature trees bear fruit.

The return of Drap d’Or de Bretagne

The name emerged from an international database. Geneticist Nick Howard had inferred the missing founder while reconstructing pedigrees, and Danish researcher Bjarne Larsen had supplied DNA from historic cultivars at the University of Copenhagen. One Danish tree matched Howard’s hypothetical founder. Historical sources identified it as Drap d’Or de Bretagne—“Brittany’s cloth of gold”—a French apple described in 1628, once cultivated across parts of Europe and later reduced to a single known collection.

When the Maine sample matched it, the implications were clear. Someone had carried a graft of this prized cultivar across the Atlantic and maintained it in colonial America. Because a seed would have produced a genetically different tree, the exact match recorded a deliberate act of migration and preservation. The result also supported Little-Siebold’s argument that French settlement contributed an underrecognized foundation to American apple culture.

Disclosure had to wait until a 2024 scientific paper made the Danish genotype public. The identification was then strengthened by two more Maine trees found within 20 miles of the Russells’ property—one linked by family history to the Civil War and another brought to an apple-identification fair. Both were genetically identical Drap d’Or. Three survivors in landscapes settled early by French colonists made coincidence or laboratory error unlikely; they showed that the variety had once been shared, grafted and valued locally.

The recovery joins history to practical conservation. Thousands of cultivars have vanished, and the traits they carried may be missing from modern orchards just when growers need more genetic options. The lesson of the Verona Island tree is therefore hopeful but urgent: neglected orchards can still contain lost branches of agricultural history, and those branches may help protect the crop’s future. Finding them requires the same hybrid method that solved this case—local memory, archival research, patient fieldwork and genetic evidence, all applied before the old trees disappear.