The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of the Apple in North America is a fascinating history deeply intertwined with human movement, art, aesthetics, and conquests. A history - both rich and sinister, profoundly memorable and deplorable, fragrant and putrid, sweet, bitter, perhaps then made liveable through the mild alcoholic haze of apple cider. What could motivate someone to reach out into this bittersweet history? Bittersweet is a gross understatement. Besides, how do you reach such a history? Every few pages The Ghost Orchard haunts you, leaves you teary-eyed.
For Helen Humphreys, this quest blossomed with a bite into an apple at her friend’s deathbed, recollecting childhood memories together with those intimate flavours and joys of it. One among such profound memories was playing by a large apple tree, building a log cabin atop it - the White Winter Pearmain. During their childhood they never wondered who it was, where had it come from? Who had planted it in the United States? The White Winter Pearmain has “an extraordinary taste—crisp and juicy with an underlay of pear and honey”. It is not a popular heritage apple anymore, yet is grown and prized for its late ripening and extraordinary taste. It was at some point seen among the best-tasting apples of the world given its complex taste profile. Joanne had been Helen’s intimate friend, including in her journey as a writer. A large gamut of literature historically has seen apple trees akin to humans, with individualised characters, immortalised through grafts. Joanne is no more, yet each bite into the sweetness produces for Helen an intimate connection that stretches across memory and time. These grafts and their apples become part and parcel of our taste, memory, preservation, and aesthetics taking cultural roots in everyday food, cooking, festive celebration, including literature and art.
The ensuing quest for the White Winter Pearmain, the identity of the old apple tree where she used to play with her friend lands Helen to this book of historical discovery - The Ghost Orchard. There are very few ways of reaching out into this history. Names - such as of the White Winter Pearmain point to an accessible history. Had the old, dying apple tree not had a name like many sweet apples among Native American orchards did not, its history would be as lost to the ravages of time. The Winter Pearmain yet can be found in travelogues, memoir, historical records, pomological accounts, arts, watercolour illustrations, etc.
““It is all down to names and naming””
Before The Ghost Orchard I did not believe in the importance of names. Like Juliette, I believed in living outside names we are given. I would also have believed that an apple mattered for its taste than its name. Helen Humphreys outreach into history has shaken my belief. It has introduced me the idea that names have a deeper stranger reality, one that produces familiarity, but also tells us how much we do not know, can not know. Names point us to deeper irreducible things. The 'White Winter Pearmain' does not just point us to a taste profile, or the character of its skin; but to a tree that is known to have once grown in Rome, first recorded in 12th century Norfolk, UK. Names evoke both - intimacy and elusion.
Shakespeare must have been wiser than Juliette, to have let her name be known wider than her story itself. Names lead us to people, things, stories of more than human worlds. Names are important for memory and storying. “It is all down to names and naming,” writes Helen Humphreys. “Anything I have been able to discover has been because there was a name to point me in a certain direction. It is no secret now that white settlers very effectively overlaid their culture on North American indigenous society and made the latter all but disappear. Where a name has survived to show us what once existed.”
Who had brought the White Winter Pearmain to the States? Perhaps Helen Humphreys embarks on this question to do her bit to preserve her time with Joanne, develop a bond with those who celebrated their intimate relationships with its distinct taste profile.
The legends yet mention of a man, writes Helen, in the early 19th century with scions of 20 apple trees in his saddlebag moving over the Mississippi River. Without a name, it is hard to reach out into any history. Yet the details are very pronounced - the kind of saddlebag, 20 trees, over the Mississippi River. It turns out, legends often wrong the details to their liking. Helen finds that the lone nameless man of legend who carried scions from 20 apple trees from the UK and over the Mississippi, including the White Winter Pearmain was no man at all, but a Quaker woman from New Garden in North Carolina. Ann is also known as Annie Appleseed and predated Johnny Appleseed by several decades. Who was Ann and why did he she embark on this journey? Why did she choose these 20 apple trees?
Ann became a Quaker minister in 1765 at 27 after her first husband’s death. Afterwards, she married a Thomas Jessop with whom she had three children. Thomas had eleven children from his previous two marriages. At some point, Ann was responsible for fourteen children. The Battle of New Garden was fought on March 15, 1781, right across courthouse. Quakers had refused to take sides in the Revolutionary War and nursed both - British and American soldiers. The Quaker meeting house had been turned into a temporary hospital. Severely understaffed, many wounded soldiers were housed in peoples homes (that soldiers had made food raids on several times preceding the war). One of Ann’s step-daughters - Sarah fell in love with a wounded British soldier. Furious, Thomas, her father disowned her, leaving her nought but 5 shillings. Ann took it upon herself to take her step-daughter across the Atlantic. Ann returned after settling Sarah in.
““It’s the late summer of life, Joanne liked to say””
Ann went back to Britain a little less than a decade later, after Thomas’s death. Ann travelled extensively with another Quaker minister - Hannah Stephenson. Ann and Hannah Stephenson had formed a deep friendship, as was often common between women Quaker ministers who were required to travel in pairs. “There was a great deal of freedom in these arrangements not available in ordinary married life,” writes Helen. “It is no surprise really, that women preachers were often on the road. Still, Ann Jessop travelled more than most”. They travelled together for two years.
Joanne had often referred to 50s as ‘the late summer of life’. As you witness a decrease in your strength and are visitations from the twilight of life, passions can run high. “And just as flowers will sometimes bloom again in August or strawberries have a second harvest, human passions can run high in the fifties. Not for the last time, but perhaps for the last time when there is still the energy to cater to those desires.” It’s not clear when Ann developed a taste for pomology, and apples in particular, but she speculates that it must have been in her journeys with Hannah Stephenson. “They weren’t chosen simply for their practical advantages—the long-keeping winter apples, for example—as there were other apples with these same characteristics. This was the heyday of apples, and there were thousands upon thousands of varieties. No, Ann Jessop chose the apples that she liked the taste of, and that she wanted to continue to taste when she set up her own orchards back home in North Carolina”. After coming back to New Garden, Ann created several orchards with her Quaker friend - Abijah Pinson. Pinson and Ann had also become very close friends. Pinson eventually married Ann’s daughter - Ann Jr. Pinson eventually created a nursery where he sold trees from Helen’s British scions. “Most of the southern and Midwestern states were planted with apples that had originated with Ann Jessop’s English scions”. Her son Jonathon developed the ‘Johnson’s Fine Keeper’, later renamed the ‘York Imperial’.
“Tasting is an intimate act”, writes Helen. It preserves memory, and in this case perhaps those she celebrated with Hannah Stephenson. Helen’s depictions of Ann’s world is lively and rapturous. Ann’s time with Hannah Stephenson reminds Helen of her own time with Joanne. A time that she had found extremely valuable for herself as a writer and a human being. In the intimate act of tasting and appreciating the White Winter Pearmain Helen feels a deeper bond with Ann. Even when Ann’s writings have all been lost, her scions have survived, to forge and inform a bond between her and Joann.
““Tasting is an intimate act.””
Such acts of intimacy and preservation are not uncommon. Robert Frost had made his yet part-surviving Ripton orchard in celebration of his times and friendship with Edward Thomas. One - that he deeply cherished and mourned, and was central to his poetic journey. The fourth chapter of this book celebrates the weight of their friendship and the worlds it conjured. It will perhaps be a post for another day.
The Indian Orchard
The first chapter of The Ghost Orchard travels even further back in time, moving further before and beyond legacies of Jhonny or Annie Appleseed. It tells us that the apple trees had made themselves at home in native lands, much before the European settlers found suitable habitation therein. ‘Indian orchards’ were often sites of conquest well within the 18th century. “Apple was their favourite fruit”, Helen draws on the first ethnobotany of the Iroquois by Arthur Caswell Parker at the New York State Museum, that was ‘actually produced in consultation with the Iroquois’. ‘Perhaps because Parker himself was of Iroquois descent’. “When he retired from his job at the museum, he returned to the former home of the Senecas near Geneva”. This chapter carries an immense weight of the genocidal burden of the history of the United States. It is also the reason I cannot review this book for more than two of its chapters. Helen’s lively prose makes it all the more gruesome - a blend of innocence and murder - a scene of burnt fields, girdled trees, and abandoned homes. That life flourishes in banishment and death, or despite it - is that beautiful, or livid?
““To “girdle” a tree is to cut a width of bark from its circumference, thus preventing the sap from rising to the branches. It is an effective way to kill a tree—and a cruel one, as the tree still looks alive””
Don’t get me wrong, the chapter is thoroughly enjoyable, but also leaves a deeper heartbreak from vivid recollections of imperial history. Looked at as a history of apple trees and orchards (than humans) doesn’t help against the heartbreak. Instead, it makes it worse - that settlers, conquerers, and imperialists have girdled more than human futures, choked more than human lives; yet only to be surpassed by enduring resilience of life - humans and otherwise. The first chapter is one of heartbreak, visuals of loss that stand right amid our present worlds. Such as Cornell University's USDA research station with the world’s largest heritage orchard and research station with more than 7000 individual trees is built right next to what was once the largest Indian orchard of Kanadesaga.
Kanadesaga was a Seneca village, their castle/capital. It had ‘extensive peach and apple orchards together with walnut, plum, mulberry, and hickory, together with abundant squash and corn’. This was until in 1779, Major General John Sullivan’s army “of some four thousand men, was sent by President George Washington to destroy the Six Nations and determine “at a single blow, whether white men or red men should hold domination over these fertile vales and along these streams, and over these lakes and mountains”.” The rumour had travelled before these men did. The Seneca had abandoned their villages to try to find refuge with the British. ‘Many families eventually succumbed to starvation or froze that particularly harsh winter of 1779’. The fields were burnt, and the orchard trees were all girdled. Helen Humphreys points to many Natives’ orchards in the early 18th century America much before John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed) traversed these lands. ‘The Tuscarora Orchard in the Oneida country in the middle of New York State was planted around 1715.’ Humphreys points out that ‘Indian Orchard’ was a common term in 19th-century dictionaries. “The Algonquians had many orchards in Southern Ontario.” There were Indian orchards in Pennsylvania, Mussourie, Arkansas.
The Indian Orchard in Terre Haute in Indiana dated back to the early 1700s and is a site of the Wea legend. Humphreys’ account of it in this chapter deepens the darkness shrouding 18th century America. A gravesite of a Shawnee Brave, Nemo together with Lena, a white woman - famed lovers buried young under the nefarious mist of their times. Before they were killed, Lena had planted some apple seeds. Eventually, an orchard appeared where they were buried. It became a sacred site for people along the Wabash River. During spring Shawnee maidens would put wildflowers on the site. ‘The fruit of these trees was left alone as nourishment for Nemo and Lena. The white settlers who took possession in the 1830s, called it, ‘Old Indian Orchard Cemetery’.’
““The Indian orchards resulted in new and distinct varieties of apples””
Natives are mostly known to have planted seeding orchards that eventually led to the flowering of the Great Apple Rush in 19th century America - more than 17,000 cultivars for a tree where the chance of getting a sweet edible fruit is of the likeliness of one for every 80,000 trees. Many renowned apple cultivars came from these Indian orchards - Mic-mac Codlin, the Indian Rarepipe, Buff, Nickajack, Cullowhee, Red Warrior, The Tell are among few whose history Humphreys’ traces in this chapter. The Pomological Society of Michigan in its 1889 annual report found old Indian orchards in good sound condition with trees that continued living so much longer than those later planted by white settlers. Within pomologists, this had also resulted in a discussion on pruning, because the natives did not prune their orchards.
Irony has it, that the very orchards - apple trees found new habitation in, enticed settlers to make home by vanquishing their original inhabitants. At many sites trees were girdled, fields were burnt, lives were lost. Helen Humphreys metaphorical analogy of loss makes it all the more deplorable - of one winter when rats had girdled her ‘fledgeling apple trees’. She tried to save these trees but could not, except one. Her amount of frustration and sense of loss fails at the recollection of what it must have been like for the Seneca of Kanadesaga.
With robust research through rich archival work, travel, and memoir, Humphreys recollection of a nefariously nightmarish history builds the ground for solidarity. Much of Humphreys’ research was made possible by ‘illustrious works of apple hunters such as Tom Brown and Lee Calhoun’. Today a small marker “Burial Mound of Seneca Indians, Destroyed Sept. 7, 1779,” marks the site of Kanadesaga; the marker was erected by women of the Fortnightly Reading Club who around 1945 invited “the last of the Seneca medicine men, Shango, to give a lecture, for which they sold tickets and raised enough money to erect the marker”.
The stories of apple trees that had found a home in Native’s Orchards and their agrarian rhythms remind me of Amitav Ghosh’s historicisation of imperialism and environment in his book, ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable’. Capitalism and environmental injustice have lesser to do with technology, he suggests, and more with imperialism. He illustrates that the pre-modern world witnessed relatively swift transfers of knowledge and technology across the globe, and yet one is overwhelmed by the inequality of their development in the making of the modern world. The prospect of objects - living or otherwise to seed more than human words in diverse ways was widely cleaved by imperialist histories of conquest and colonisation. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 is among dark flag posts of such global history. The natives' orchards symbolise, the lost potential of life (and technology) to seed more than human worlds in variegated ways.