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It’s mid-May and apple trees are in blossom across the eastern Ontario landscape. Drive along just about any backroad and you’ll come upon small stands of flowering trees in old homestead orchards, or scatterings of solitary trees in fencerows. Yesterday, we stopped to photograph one such tree growing next to a split rail fence alongside a backroad in Lanark County. It was loaded with big pink and white blossoms.

I’ve always had a special fondness for old apple trees — the kind that you find in abandoned orchards or along roadsides. When I was growing up and spending summers at my family’s cottage on the Ottawa River, a small gang of us used to ride our horses up and down dirt roads, often stopping to eat apples from several trees in a meadow on the site of an old farmhouse. Each tree was a little different – the apples on some were larger, or more pink, or red or yellow, and some were closer to ripe than others. We would sample apples from each tree, taking two or three bites from each and then tossing the generous remains onto the ground just ahead of the noses of our grazing horses. They would quickly crunch the fruits to pulp and gulp them down. In this way, we’d probably eat close to a dozen each. Although not yet ripe, those sun-warmed apples were sweeter and more flavorsome than any I’ve sampled since — or perhaps that’s just how they seem through the filter of time.

Even now, I watch for roadside trees to sample. Often, I pull off the road only to find that the apples are small, hard, scabby and full or worms. But sometimes I hit the jackpot and find a tree with crisp, sweet apples with barely a blemish. They almost never look like any apple that might be found in a produce department. No, these apples are smaller — fit in the palm of your hand-sized — and often all yellow or cherry red or close to flaming orange. If they have a name, chances are that few people would know it. When you find one of these good trees, it’s worth taking special note so that you can drop by for a visit again another year. I know of one such tree not far from here, overhanging a creek and accessible only by canoe. You have to float in under it and knock the apples off with your paddle so that they tumble down to roll around by your feet. The apples are a deep burgundy — crunchy and aromatic.

A love for apples probably runs in my family. My Mom grew up near Iroquois, on the shores of the St. Lawrence River. To this day, the area is still great apple country. The historic epicenter being Dundela, site of the farm of John McIntosh, where stood the original tree from which all McIntosh apple trees are descended. McIntosh is said to have found that tree growing with about twenty other “wild trees” which he transplanted to form a small orchard. All of the rest died except the one tree which bore the apples which became known as McIntosh Reds. Around 1835, he and his son, Allen, learned how to graft scions from the tree to produce more trees. The rest is history, as the McIntosh went on to become one of the most popular apples in North America, and figures strongly in many hybrids developed from its stock.

Now we’ve come to a time in which grocery store apples are large and virtually perfect. And yet, I find them strangely lacking in character and taste. Perhaps it’s how they’re grown and stored. I don’t really know. But one thing I’m sure of is that they don’t taste near so nice as those sun-warmed apples picked from horseback in the abandoned orchard of my youth.

Note: To read more about the history of the McIntosh apple, visit this page on Wikipedia.

Tags: heritage apples, McIntosh apple, Dundela