The World of Apples

History of the apple

The apple began as a wild tree in the mountains of Central Asia. Carried west along the Silk Road, crossed with other wild apples and kept true by grafting, it became the most common fruit crop of the world's temperate lands.

The wild ancestor

The cultivated apple comes mainly from a wild apple of Central Asia, Malus sieversii. When a draft of the apple’s genome was published in 2010, its authors’ family tree of the genus identified this species as the cultivated apple’s progenitor1. It grows at middle elevations, typically 900 to 1,600 m, in the mountains of Central Asia, and it varies greatly from tree to tree; some trees bear fruit more than 60 mm across2, and in the Tian Shan some bear fruit up to 8 cm across, some of it sweet and well flavoured3.

The orchard apple is not simply a tamed M. sieversii. A study published in 2012, which compared 839 wild and cultivated trees of five species from China to Spain, found that the European crab apple, Malus sylvestris, had contributed so much, through crossing in both directions, that today’s apples are genetically closer to it than to their Central Asian ancestor4. A 2017 study that sequenced the genomes of 117 apples and wild relatives placed the origin among the wild apples of Kazakhstan, followed by heavy crossing with the European crab apple; it found the wild apples on the Chinese side of the Tian Shan, in Xinjiang, to be an isolated population that took no direct part5. The same study found that the fruit grew larger in two steps, one before domestication and one during it5.

In 2020 the genomes of Gala and of its two major wild progenitors, M. sieversii and M. sylvestris, were assembled in full. Their authors concluded that the apple’s domestication was “mainly driven by interspecific hybridization”, and found about 23% of the Gala genome to be of hybrid origin6. The botanical name of the cultivated apple, and how far it overlaps with its wild ancestor, are set out under Malus domestica.

Along the Silk Road

People took the domesticated apple west from the Tian Shan along the trade routes known as the Silk Road. On the way it met other wild apples, all able to cross freely with it: Malus baccata in Siberia, Malus orientalis in the Caucasus and M. sylvestris in Europe2. A review published in 2014 put the first domestication in Central Asia about 4,000 to 10,000 years ago, with the crossing following as the apple spread west2. In the wild apple forests of Kazakhstan, the trees that carry most genes from other apples grow closest to the route of the old Silk Road, which suggests that much of the crossing happened as the apple travelled6.

Archaeology adds some fixed points. People gathered wild apples in Europe long before any were grown there: apple seeds have been found at the Mesolithic site of Staosnaig, on the Scottish island of Colonsay, and tens of thousands at Neolithic villages in central Switzerland3. In the Tian Shan itself, the only possible archaeological apple seed found so far comes from the village of Tuzusai, in Kazakhstan, from the end of the first millennium BC3. Robert Spengler, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, argues that the hybrid apple formed when people carried Tian Shan trees west into the range of other wild apples, that the trade across Eurasia was the driving force of its domestication, and that domestication by hybridisation can be rapid3.

China has grown apples of its own for more than 2,000 years: small, soft apples, among them Malus asiatica and Malus prunifolia, grown as dessert fruit. Genome data suggest that both arose as hybrids between the Siberian crab apple and the wild apples of Kazakhstan5.

Grafting and the classical world

An apple tree raised from a pip seldom, if ever, bears fruit like its parent’s7, and without grafting the qualities of a good tree could not have been kept3. Theophrastus (371–287 BC)3 knew this: trees raised from slips bear fruit like the parent tree, he wrote, but apple seedlings “produce an inferior kind which is acid instead of sweet”8.

Grafting is thought to be about 3,800 years old, on the evidence of a cuneiform record of grapevine budwood brought into Mesopotamia. There is indirect evidence that apples were grown in Mesopotamia 3,000 years ago, but the clearest evidence of apple growing comes from the Greek world, from about the third century BC; the Romans probably learned grafting, cultivation, harvesting and storage from the Greeks and carried them across their empire2. Dwarf apple trees were known 2,300 years ago2.

The Roman writers on farming give practical detail. Cato (234–149 BC)3 tells the farmer that apples and pears may be grafted in spring, for fifty days around the summer solstice, or at the vintage, in the dark of the moon, after noon, when no south wind blows; the shoot is driven in between bark and wood and the graft sealed with a paste of clay or chalk, sand and cattle dung9. Varro adds the rule that the shoot should be of a better kind than the tree it is grafted on, and says that apples keep well laid on straw in a cool, dry fruit store whose windows face north10.

Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79)3 lists apples named after the people who introduced them: Matius, Cestius, Mallius and Scandius. The Appian came from Appius, of the Claudian family, who grafted the quince on the Scandian; the newest, he says, was the small Petisian, “remarkable for its delightful flavour”11. By the early first millennium AD, grafting apples seems to have been a widespread practice in southern Europe3.

The Islamic and medieval worlds

In Muslim Spain the apple had its place in the great farming manuals. Ibn al-Awwam, who lived in Seville and wrote, by his translator’s reckoning, in the twelfth century12, gives the apple tree a chapter of its own. Quoting earlier authorities, it distinguishes sweet and sour kinds and several named sorts, one with red fruit; it recommends moist plains and fresh meadows, and finds that the tree does much better in cold regions than in hot; and it describes raising trees from suckers, layers, cuttings and pips, the pips sown about the middle of February12. Pears, it adds, are grafted onto apple trees planted beside irrigation channels12.

In the Frankish kingdom, the Capitulare de villis, the rules for the royal estates, which its editor A. Boretius dated to 800 or before, ends with a list of apples: four named kinds, gozmaringa, geroldinga, crevedella and spirauca, then sweet and sour apples, keeping apples, apples to eat at once and early apples13. The same rules have the stewards report on “the grafted trees of all kinds” and keep workmen who know how to make “beer, cider, perry”14. On the ninth-century plan of the monastery of St Gall, the monks’ burial ground doubles as an orchard, and the first of the trees named on it, its label damaged, has been read as the apple15.

In Normandy, cider apple trees arrived between the tenth and twelfth centuries, by the account of the French body that oversees the Calvados appellation, and their tannin-rich kinds replaced wild apples for making drinks16. The palaeographer Léopold Delisle, quoted by the pomologist André Leroy, found apple trees and cider mentioned fairly often in Norman records from 110017, and a treatise on cider by Julien Le Paulmier dates from 158918. In England, John Evelyn wrote in 1664 that a fruiterer to Henry VIII named Harris had planted the fields around some thirty towns in Kent with fruit, and that, by the example of Lord Scudamore and others, “all Hereford-shire is become, in a manner, but one intire Orchard”19. The Redstreak, the first fine cider apple grown in Herefordshire, was raised early in the seventeenth century, and its raising is generally credited to Scudamore20.

Named varieties and the pomologists

From the late eighteenth century, growers set out to breed apples deliberately, and to describe and name them. Thomas Andrew Knight (1759–1838), a Herefordshire landowner, raised new varieties of apples and other fruit, wrote on grafting from 1795, published a treatise on the culture of the apple and pear in 1797, and was president of the Horticultural Society from 1811 until his death21. His Pomona Herefordiensis of 1811, with thirty coloured plates21, was published by the Agricultural Society of Herefordshire partly because of what Knight called “the rapid decay of every old variety of the apple and pear”. It explains how he crossed chosen varieties by hand, removing the stamens of one and dusting it with the pollen of the other, and warns that a planter is fortunate if fifty seeds give a single fine variety for the cider press20. Among the new varieties raised this way was the Downton Pippin, from a seed of the Orange Pippin and the pollen of the Golden Pippin20.

Pomology, the naming and description of fruit varieties, flourished in the nineteenth century. In Britain, Robert Hogg’s The Fruit Manual, in its fifth edition of 1884, which came twenty-four years after the first, set out to describe “all the fruits generally cultivated in the United Kingdom” and offered a new classification of the apple22. In Germany, Eduard Lucas (1816–1882) founded a pomological institute at Reutlingen, which he headed from 1860, the first comprehensive school of its kind in the country, and ran the business of the German pomologists’ society, including its work of identifying varieties23. In France, André Leroy (1801–1875), a nurseryman at Angers, gathered about 3,000 varieties of fruit from 1830 and wrote a Dictionnaire de pomologie in six volumes from 1867, tracing each variety’s origin, synonyms and uses24; its apple volumes began in 187317.

In the United States, Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) published his book on the fruit and fruit trees of America in London and New York in 184525. S. A. Beach’s The Apples of New York (1905) drew on a collection, begun in 1883 at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station, that held over 700 named varieties of apples and crab apples by 19007. W. H. Ragan’s Nomenclature of the Apple, issued by the United States Department of Agriculture in January 1905, set out to bring together “all known names that have appeared in the American literature of the apple” from 1804 to 1904, a nomenclature it found “in more or less confusion”26.

The Americas

European settlers brought apples to North America as seeds, scions and grafted trees7. In Virginia, apples are recorded as grafted on wild stocks in 1647, and in 1686 William Fitzhugh described on his plantation “a large orchard of about 2,500 apple trees, most grafted”7. In 1726 a writer reported that a village of about forty families near Boston had made nearly ten thousand barrels of cider7. Over much of New York, though, the early farm orchards were mostly seedlings, whose “common” or cider apples went to feed stock and to the cider press7.

The best-remembered planter of seedlings was John Chapman (1774–1845), Johnny Appleseed, who gathered seed at the cider mills of western Pennsylvania, raised seedling trees, and sold them to settlers or gave them away; at his death he held “more than 1,200 acres of cultivated land” in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana27,28. In New York, from about the middle of the nineteenth century, the nursery trade grew more active and orchards of grafted nursery trees replaced seedling orchards; the Prince nursery at Flushing, on Long Island, founded about 1730, listed 350 apples in its catalogue of 1845, counting only the best7.

Nurseries also searched for new varieties. In 1893 the Stark Brothers nursery of Louisiana, Missouri, held a show of new fruits to find an apple to replace the widely grown but poorly flavoured Ben Davis. A striped, elongated red apple sent by Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa grower, won in 1894; the nursery bought the rights at Peru, Iowa, and named the apple Delicious29. In 1915 the same nursery paid $5,000 for the rights to a tree of long-keeping yellow apples belonging to A. H. Mullins, on Porter’s Creek in West Virginia, and named the apple Golden Delicious29.

New varieties were also recorded in paint. Between 1886 and 1942 the United States Department of Agriculture commissioned about twenty-one artists to paint fruit for the lithographs in its bulletins and yearbooks; its collection holds 7,584 watercolour paintings, lithographs and line drawings, 3,807 of them of apples30.

The southern hemisphere

Apples went south with European ships. At the Cape of Good Hope, where the Dutch East India Company set up a supply station for its ships in 1652, the first two ripe apples were picked on 17 April 166231. Commercial orchards came much later: in the Elgin valley, about 70 km south-east of Cape Town, the first known orchard of deciduous fruit was planted on a farm bought in 1898, and the railway reached Elgin on 1 August 190232.

In 1788 William Bligh, calling at Adventure Bay in Van Diemen’s Land on his way to Tahiti, planted “three fine young apple-trees” among fruit trees he had brought from the Cape33; they are counted as the first apple trees planted in Australia34. Tasmania’s orchards became an industry in the mid-nineteenth century, survived the arrival of codling moth in the 1870s, and exported most in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly to Europe. After Britain joined the European Common Market in the early 1970s, exports fell, and a tree-pull scheme between 1972 and 1975 cut production by half and the number of orchardists by 70034.

Near Sydney, according to an account first published in 1924, Maria Ann Smith showed Edwin Small and his father a seedling apple growing by a creek on her farm at Eastwood in 1868. She died in 1870; her apple was shown as Smith’s seedling at Castle Hill in 1890, and in 1895 the New South Wales government’s fruit expert, Albert H. Benson, named it as a variety for export35. It is the Granny Smith.

In New Zealand, the missionary Samuel Marsden planted the first apple and pear trees at Kerikeri in 181936. In the Nelson district a settler, William Cullen, planted an apple orchard at Richmond in 1845. By the 1920s Tasman was one of the country’s main apple regions: about 114,000 cases left the Māpua wharf in the 1925 season, about a third of New Zealand’s export fruit, and in the 1934 season the district’s millionth case of apples was presented to Lord Rutherford37.

On Chiloé, the Chilean archipelago held by Spain from 1567 to 1826, thirteen traditional apple varieties are thought to descend from the first trees acclimatised there in colonial times. Apples there have served as food and drink (chicha), fertiliser, pig feed and firewood, and wills and inventories from Chiloé between 1849 and 1924 treat apple trees as property of real value; documents from Chile’s Central Valley name nine kinds of apple from the eighteenth century38. In Argentina, apple and pear growing in the Alto Valle of Río Negro began in the 1930s, on land watered by irrigation works whose first stage, from 1911, was half paid for by the British-owned Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway, which also set up an agricultural station at Cinco Saltos in 1918; the typical grower farmed seven to ten irrigated hectares39.

East Asia

China is rich in wild apples: the Flora of China counts 25 species there, 15 of them found nowhere else40. Western varieties came in the late nineteenth century41. The American Presbyterian missionary John Livingston Nevius moved to Yantai, then called Chefoo, in Shandong, in 187141. Finding most of the local fruit very poor, he sent to the United States and Europe for varieties, planted them in what became known as the “foreign fruit garden”, and gave grafts free to anyone who asked42. By 1887, fruit propagated from his garden was coming into local markets, and summer visitors from Shanghai were willing to pay “twenty-five or thirty cents a pound” for the foreign apples and pears42. He is credited with bringing thirteen apple varieties to China, among them Gravenstein, Yellow Bellflower and Roxbury Russet41.

In Japan, small, sour apples had come from China after the Heian period, but the large apples grown today descend from Western seedlings imported from America in the Meiji era43. Western apples were introduced in 187144. In the spring of 1875 the Home Ministry sent three saplings to Aomori Prefecture, where they were planted in the grounds of the prefectural office, and several hundred more followed by the spring of 1876 for farmers to try44. An American missionary teaching in Hirosaki, John Ing, is said to have first introduced Western apples to the prefecture by sharing apples with his pupils at Christmas, and Kikuchi Tatee, who distributed the first seedlings around Tsugaru, is remembered as the founder of Aomori’s apple growing44. Fuji, bred at the national fruit tree research institute, made up more than half of Japan’s apple production by 201043.

The twentieth century

Science changed how apples were grown, stored and bred. In nineteenth-century Europe, dwarfing rootstocks were known by names such as Paradise and Doucin; at East Malling in Kent, at a fruit research station founded in 1913 with the support of local growers45, they were sorted into a standard series of ten, and two of the originals, M9 (Paradis Jaune de Metz) and M7 (Doucin Reinette), are still widely used2.

From 1920, Franklin Kidd and Cyril West at Cambridge made the first systematic studies of storing fruit in controlled mixtures of gases; the first commercial gas store for apples was built near Canterbury in 1929, and by 1938 the United Kingdom had 20046. In 1934 R. Gane showed that ripening apples and pears give off ethylene46. In the United States, according to a government report of 1966, the commercial use of controlled-atmosphere storage for apples had begun “over a quarter century ago”; such storage kept McIntosh for seven to eight months, and on 31 October in both 1964 and 1965 more than a fifth of the apples in the country’s cold stores were in controlled atmosphere47.

Breeders turned to wild apples for resistance to disease48. At the University of Illinois, crosses between cultivated apples and crab apples made early in the century left material in which a graduate student, L. Fredric Hough, noticed resistance to apple scab in 1943; from 1945 Illinois and Purdue, later joined by Rutgers, bred from it together, crossing back to orchard varieties again and again48. The programme began from two scab-resistant seedlings of a cross between Malus floribunda 821 and Rome Beauty, and its first variety, Prima, was released in 197049. By 2000 it had released, alone or with others, 18 scab-resistant varieties carrying the resistance gene from Malus floribunda 821, and breeders worldwide had released about 50 varieties derived from its material48. The wild apple is described under Malus × floribunda.

Where apples were grown changed too. In 1961 the United States grew more apples than any other country, 2,584,000 tonnes, ahead of Italy and France, while China grew 167,000 tonnes50. By 2024 mainland China produced 51,285,100 tonnes, more than half of the world’s harvest50.

Today

The apple is the most common fruit crop of the world’s temperate lands4. In 2024 the world grew 97,880,076 tonnes of apples, more than five times the 17,053,651 tonnes of 196150. After mainland China, the largest producers were the United States (4,922,840 tonnes), Türkiye (4,420,185), Poland (3,384,500) and India (2,625,899)50.

The wild forests where the apple began are under pressure: the Central Asian wild apple was heavily overharvested in the Soviet era, and its remaining stands are threatened by the destruction of forests2. Genes now flow the other way as well, from orchards into the wild, and many trees that look wild, in Europe and in the Tian Shan alike, carry the marks of crossing with cultivated apples3. The words for apple in the world’s languages are gathered on the words page.

Where the sources disagree

  • When the apple was domesticated. The 2014 review and the 2017 genome study put the start in Central Asia 4,000 to 10,000 years ago2,5. Spengler finds no evidence of farming in the Tian Shan until about 4,500 years ago, or of tending fruit trees there until about 2,400 years ago, and thinks deliberate breeding unlikely before about 3,000 years ago3.
  • How many ancestors. Spengler counts at least four wild species in the cultivated apple: the Tian Shan apple and the Siberian, Caucasian and European crab apples3. The 2014 review shows genes entering it from the Caucasian and European crab apples2, and the 2020 genome study names two major progenitors, the Tian Shan apple and the European crab apple6.
  • Europe or Asia. Writing in 1873, Leroy held that the apple grew wild in most of Europe’s forests and was not received from Asia17. The genetic studies trace it to Central Asia, with a large later contribution from the European crab apple4,5.
  • Roman apples. Pliny counts Cato’s Scantian and Quirinian among the apples11; the Loeb translation of Cato calls them quinces9, as does Leroy, who pointed out that the Latin words for apple covered every round, fleshy fruit, and reckoned that of Pliny’s thirty kinds only seventeen were apples that Pliny was the first to record17.
  • The Frankish list of apples. Boretius printed the list of apples at the end of the Capitulare de villis, but noted the view of Guérard, whose study of the capitulary was read to the Paris academy in 1852, that the words from the list onward did not belong to it13.
  • How cider reached Normandy. The Calvados appellation’s account dates the arrival of cider apples in Normandy to the tenth to twelfth centuries16. Leroy records an older tradition that Norman sailors brought the apple tree from Biscay about 1300; he rejects it on Delisle’s evidence of earlier cider, and suggests that the sailors brought back some varieties instead17.
  • Bligh’s apple trees. Bligh wrote that he planted three young apple trees at Adventure Bay33; the Australian Food Timeline says seven51.
  • Johnny Appleseed’s first nursery. The Heinz History Center places it at Warren, Pennsylvania, by the 1790s28; North Carolina’s historic sites service says he planted his first orchard near Franklin, Pennsylvania, around 180027.
  • What the Granny Smith is. The City of Ryde’s history, which records Maria Smith’s own account that the seedling grew from the remains of French crab apples grown in Tasmania, calls the variety a fixed mutation, or sport35. A 2025 news report quotes a University of Sydney scientist who describes it as a natural seedling, thought to come from a chance cross between the cultivated apple and the crab apple52.

Sources

  1. The genome of the domesticated apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.), Riccardo Velasco and others, Nature Genetics 42: 833–839, 2010. Supports: the draft genome of the domesticated apple, published 29 August 2010; the phylogenetic reconstruction that "identified the progenitor of the cultivated apple as M. sieversii".
  2. The domestication and evolutionary ecology of apples, A. Cornille, T. Giraud, M. J. M. Smulders, I. Roldán-Ruiz and P. Gladieux, Trends in Genetics 30(2): 57–65; Wageningen University & Research repository, 2014. Supports: M. sieversii growing typically at 900–1,600 m in Central Asia, extremely variable, some trees with fruit over 60 mm across; origin from M. sieversii in Central Asia "about 4000 to 10 000 years ago" and spread west along the Silk Route, meeting M. baccata in Siberia, M. orientalis in the Caucasus and M. sylvestris in Europe, all fully interfertile with the cultivated apple; grafting thought to have begun about 3,800 years ago (a cuneiform record of grape budwood brought into Mesopotamia); indirect evidence of apple growing in Mesopotamia 3,000 years ago and the most compelling evidence from the Greek period, from about the third century BC; the Romans probably learning grafting, cultivation, harvesting and storage from the Greeks; dwarf apple trees known 2,300 years ago; Paradise and Doucin clones in nineteenth-century Europe, the standard collection of ten East Malling rootstocks, and M9 (Paradis Jaune de Metz) and M7 (Doucin Reinette) still widely used; the overharvesting of M. sieversii in the Soviet era and the threat of forest destruction.
  3. Origins of the apple: the role of megafaunal mutualism in the domestication of Malus and rosaceous trees, Robert N. Spengler, Frontiers in Plant Science 10: 617, 2019. Supports: wild Tian Shan trees with fruit up to 8 cm across, some sweet and well flavoured; Malus seeds at the Mesolithic site of Staosnaig on Colonsay, Scotland, and tens of thousands at Neolithic villages in central Switzerland; the only possible archaeological apple seed from the Tian Shan, at Tuzusai, from the end of the first millennium BC; the trans-Eurasian (Silk Road) exchange as the driving force of domestication, and domestication through hybridisation as a rapid process; the dates of Theophrastus (371–287 BC), Cato (234–149 BC) and Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79); apple grafting widespread in southern Europe by the early first millennium AD; no evidence of farming in the Tian Shan until about 4,500 years ago or of the cultivation of woody perennials until about 2,400 years ago, and deliberate breeding unlikely before about 3,000 years ago; the modern apple a hybrid of at least four species; most "wild" apples in Europe and the Tian Shan now showing signs of hybridisation with cultivated apples.
  4. New insight into the history of domesticated apple: secondary contribution of the European wild apple to the genome of cultivated varieties, A. Cornille and others, PLoS Genetics 8(5): e1002703, 2012. Supports: the apple as "the most common and culturally important fruit crop of temperate areas"; a study of 839 accessions of five Malus species from China to Spain; the European crab apple a major secondary contributor, with gene flow in both directions making the domesticated apple genetically closer to it than to M. sieversii.
  5. Genome re-sequencing reveals the history of apple and supports a two-stage model for fruit enlargement, Naibin Duan and others, Nature Communications 8: 249, 2017. Supports: genome sequencing of 117 Malus accessions; cultivated apples originating from M. sieversii in Kazakhstan, followed by intensive introgression from M. sylvestris; the Xinjiang population an "ancient" isolated ecotype not directly contributing to domestication; fruit enlargement in two stages, before and during domestication; Chinese soft apples, M. asiatica and M. prunifolia, grown as dessert apples for more than 2,000 years and very likely hybrids of M. baccata and Kazakh M. sieversii; domestication from M. sieversii "for 4000–10,000 years".
  6. Phased diploid genome assemblies and pan-genomes provide insights into the genetic history of apple domestication, Xuepeng Sun and others, Nature Genetics 52: 1423–1432, 2020. Supports: haplotype-resolved genomes of Gala and of M. sieversii and M. sylvestris, its "two major wild progenitors"; domestication "mainly driven by interspecific hybridization"; about 23% of the Gala genome of hybrid origin; the Kazakh wild apples with most introgression sampled closest to the route of the ancient Silk Road.
  7. The Apples of New York, vol. I, preface and pp. 7–13, S. A. Beach, New York Agricultural Experiment Station (Albany: J. B. Lyon), Internet Archive, 1905. Supports: the station's apple collection, begun in 1883, holding over 700 named varieties of apples and crab apples by 1900 (preface); apples seldom if ever coming true from seed (p. 7); seedling "common" or cider apples fed to stock and made into cider (p. 8); most early orchards of seedling trees (p. 9); importations of seeds, scions and grafted trees; grafting on wild stocks recorded in Virginia in 1647; William Fitzhugh's orchard of about 2,500 apple trees, "most grafted", in 1686; Dudley's report in 1726 of a village near Boston of about forty families making near ten thousand barrels of cider (pp. 9–10, quoting W. A. Taylor); the Prince nurseries at Flushing, Long Island, founded about 1730 (p. 9); their catalogue of 1845 listing 350 apples, and grafted nursery trees replacing seedling orchards from about the middle of the nineteenth century (p. 13).
  8. Enquiry into Plants, book II, 2.4–2.5, Theophrastus, translated by Arthur Hort (London: W. Heinemann), ToposText, 1916. Supports: trees raised from slips bearing fruit like the parent tree, those raised from seed "nearly all inferior", and apple seedlings producing "an inferior kind which is acid instead of sweet".
  9. On Agriculture, chapters 7, 40 and 41, Cato the Elder, Loeb Classical Library edition, LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer), 1934. Supports: chapter 7: "sparrow-apples, Scantian and Quirinian quinces" and must-apples among the fruit to plant or graft; chapters 40–41: apples and pears grafted in spring, for fifty days at the summer solstice, or at the vintage, in the dark of the moon, after noon, when no south wind blows; the shoot driven in between bark and wood and the graft sealed with clay or chalk, sand and cattle dung.
  10. On Agriculture, book I, 40 and 59, Varro, Loeb Classical Library edition, LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer), 1934. Supports: the rule that a graft should be of a better kind than the tree it is grafted on (1.40); the apples for keeping, among them the Scantian, the Scaudian, the small round and the must-apples "now called honey-apples", kept dry and cool on straw, in fruit stores with windows facing north (1.59).
  11. The Natural History of Pliny, vol. III, book XV, chapter 15: The fruits that have been most recently introduced, Pliny the Elder, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn), Project Gutenberg, 1855. Supports: apples named after the people who first introduced them, Matius, Cestius, Mallius and Scandius; the Appian, from Appius, of the Claudian family, grafting the quince on the Scandian; the small Petisian, the latest introduced, "remarkable for its delightful flavour"; the Quirinian and Scantian of Cato listed among the apples.
  12. Le livre de l'agriculture d'Ibn-al-Awam, vol. I, p. 17 (introduction) and pp. 308–310: Culture du pommier, Ibn al-Awwam, translated by J.-J. Clément-Mullet (Paris: A. Franck), Internet Archive, 1864. Supports: p. 17: the treatise apparently composed about the sixth century of the Hijra, the twelfth of the Christian era, by an author who lived in Seville; pp. 308–310: kinds of apple tree, sweet and sour, several named, one red-fruited (after Abou'l-Khaïr); moist plains and fresh meadows as the best places to plant; better success in cold regions than in hot; propagation by suckers, split-off branches, cuttings, layers and pips, the pips sown about the middle of February; pears grafted on apple trees planted beside irrigation channels.
  13. Capitularia regum Francorum, vol. I, pp. 82–91: Capitulare de villis, A. Boretius (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover: Hahn), Internet Archive. Supports: the capitulary dated "800 vel ante?" (p. 82); its closing list of apple names (gozmaringa, geroldinga, crevedella, spirauca) and of sweet, sour, keeping and early apples (p. 91); Guérard's view, noted by Boretius, that the words from the apple names onward do not belong to the capitulary (p. 91).
  14. Capitulare de villis (extracts), from J. H. Robinson, Readings in European History, vol. I (1904), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Supports: stewards to report on "the grafted trees of all kinds" and to keep workmen who know how to make "beer, cider, perry, or other kind of liquor good to drink".
  15. Description of the ancient plan of the monastery of St. Gall, in the ninth century, Robert Willis, Archaeological Journal 5(1): 85–117; Zenodo, 1848. Supports: the burial ground on the ninth-century plan planted with fruit trees, the first named "Mal.... (Malarius?) Apple-tree".
  16. Calvados: eaux-de-vie de cidre et de poiré, Institut national de l'origine et de la qualité (INAO). Supports: cider apple trees introduced into Normandy between the tenth and twelfth centuries, their tannin-rich varieties displacing wild apples for making drinks.
  17. Dictionnaire de pomologie, vol. III: Pommes, A–L, pp. 5–11: Du pommier, histoire, André Leroy (Angers), Internet Archive, 1873. Supports: p. 5: Leroy's view that the apple grows wild in most of the forests of Europe and was not received from Asia; pp. 6–7: the tradition that Norman sailors brought the apple from Biscay about 1300; Léopold Delisle (1851) on cider in Charlemagne's domains and on apple trees and cider becoming fairly often mentioned in Normandy from 1100; Leroy's suggestion that sailors brought varieties, not the tree; pp. 9–11: Cato's Scantian and Quirinian as quinces, the Latin words for apple covering all round, fleshy fruits, and only seventeen of Pliny's thirty kinds being apples he was the first to record.
  18. De Gilles de Gouberville à Julien Le Paulmier (review), Jean-Jacques Bertaux, Annales de Normandie 55(4): 381–383, Persée, 2005. Supports: Julien Le Paulmier's treatise on cider of 1589.
  19. Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, with Pomona, or an Appendix concerning Fruit-Trees in relation to Cider: Pomona, the preface, John Evelyn (London: John Martyn and James Allestry, printers to the Royal Society), Internet Archive, 1664. Supports: Harris, "a Fruiterer to King Henry the Eighth", planting the fields about thirty towns in Kent with fruit; the example of Lord Scudamore, by which "all Hereford-shire is become, in a manner, but one intire Orchard".
  20. Pomona Herefordiensis: preface (pp. i–iv) and no. I, The Redstreak, Thomas Andrew Knight, for the Agricultural Society of Herefordshire (London), Internet Archive, 1811. Supports: publication by the Agricultural Society of Herefordshire because of "the rapid decay of every old variety of the apple and pear"; "The decay of every variety of the apple and pear, which has been long cultivated, is now very generally admitted"; Knight's crossing of chosen varieties by hand, removing the stamens and applying the pollen of the chosen male parent; "fifty seeds afford a single fine variety for the press"; the Redstreak as the first fine cider apple cultivated in Herefordshire, its raising early in the seventeenth century generally credited to Lord Scudamore; thirty plates, among them the Downton Pippin.
  21. Knight, Thomas Andrew, Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900), Wikisource. Supports: Knight's dates (1759–1838) and his estates in Herefordshire; his raising of new varieties of apples and other fruit; his papers on grafting from 1795; his presidency of the Horticultural Society from 1811 until his death; A Treatise on the Culture of the Apple and Pear (1797); Pomona Herefordiensis (1811), with thirty coloured plates.
  22. The Fruit Manual, fifth edition: preface and classification of apples, Robert Hogg (London: Journal of Horticulture Office), Internet Archive, 1884. Supports: the fifth edition published "twenty-four years" after the first; its aim of describing "all the fruits generally cultivated in the United Kingdom"; Hogg's new classification of the apple, after earlier attempts by Diel, Sickler, Dochnahl, Lucas and others.
  23. Lucas, Eduard, Carl Leisewitz, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 19, Wikisource. Supports: Lucas's dates (1816–1882); his pomological institute at Reutlingen, planned in 1859 and headed by him from early 1860, "die erste umfassende Anstalt der Art in Deutschland"; his management of the German pomologists' society, with its work of identifying fruit varieties.
  24. André Leroy (1801–1875), « Savant botaniste et habile manufacturier », Cristiana Oghina-Pavie, Jardins de France no. 641 (SNHF). Supports: Leroy's dates; his nursery at Angers and his collection, from 1830, of about 3,000 varieties of pears, apples, cherries, plums, peaches and vines; the Dictionnaire de pomologie in six volumes from 1867, the result of research into each variety's origin, synonyms and uses.
  25. Downing, Andrew Jackson, Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900 edition), Wikisource, 1900. Supports: Downing's dates (1815–1852); his book on the fruit and fruit trees of America, printed in London and New York in 1845.
  26. Nomenclature of the Apple: a catalogue of the known varieties referred to in American publications from 1804 to 1904 (Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin 56): introduction, W. H. Ragan, United States Department of Agriculture, Internet Archive, 1905. Supports: issued on 25 January 1905; its object to bring together "all known names that have appeared in the American literature of the apple"; the nomenclature of the apple "in more or less confusion".
  27. John Chapman: pioneer nurseryman, North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites and Properties (Horne Creek Farm). Supports: Chapman's dates (26 September 1774 to 18 March 1845); his first orchard planted around 1800 near Franklin, Pennsylvania, from seed collected at cider mills in western Pennsylvania; his seedling orchards; his selling of seeds and seedlings and giving away nearly as many trees as he sold; "more than 1,200 acres of cultivated land" in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana at his death.
  28. Western Pennsylvania history: the real Johnny Appleseed, Brady Smith, Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh), 2017-06-06. Supports: Chapman's first nursery planted at Warren, Pennsylvania, by the 1790s; apple seeds gathered at cider mills and sold to settlers moving west; his death in Indiana in 1845.
  29. Stark Brothers' Nurseries & Orchards: two centuries of new fruit cultivars and innovations, Michele R. Warmund, Journal of the American Pomological Society 75(2): 115–129, 2021. Supports: the nursery established near Louisiana, Missouri, in 1816; its new-fruit show of 1893, held to find a replacement for the widely grown but poorly flavoured Ben Davis; Jesse Hiatt's striped, elongated red apple, Hawkeye, the winner in 1894, its rights bought at Peru, Iowa, and named Delicious; A. H. Mullins's long-keeping yellow apples, sent in April 1912 from Porter's Creek, West Virginia, and the rights to his tree bought in 1915 for $5,000, the apple named Golden Delicious.
  30. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Pomological Watercolor Collection, National Agricultural Library, USDA (Ag Data Commons), 2023. Supports: paintings made from 1886 to 1942, most between 1894 and 1916, by about twenty-one artists commissioned by the USDA, for lithographs in its bulletins and yearbooks; 7,584 watercolour paintings, lithographs and line drawings, including 3,807 images of apples.
  31. Our history, Hortgro. Supports: the Cape of Good Hope founded by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 as a refreshment station for its ships; the first two ripe apples picked at the Cape on 17 April 1662.
  32. Elgin, South African History Online. Supports: the Elgin valley about 70 km south-east of Cape Town; Sir Antonie Viljoen's farm, bought in 1898, with the first known deciduous orchard in the area; the railway reaching Elgin on 1 August 1902.
  33. A Voyage to the South Sea, for the purpose of conveying the bread-fruit tree to the West Indies, in His Majesty's ship the Bounty: chapter 4, William Bligh (London: George Nicol), Project Gutenberg, 1792. Supports: the planting at Adventure Bay, Van Diemen's Land, in August 1788, of "three fine young apple-trees" among fruit trees brought from the Cape of Good Hope.
  34. Apple industry, Nathalie Servant, The Companion to Tasmanian History, University of Tasmania. Supports: Bligh's three apple seedlings at Adventure Bay in 1788, "the first apple trees planted in Australia"; commercial growing from the mid-nineteenth century; codlin moth introduced in the 1870s; exports peaking in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly to Europe; the fall after Britain joined the European Common Market in the early 1970s, and the Tree Pull Scheme of 1972–1975, which cut production by 50 per cent and the number of orchardists by 700.
  35. Granny Smith, John Spurway and Megan Martin, City of Ryde Library Service, 1992. Supports: the earliest account of the variety's origin (Farmer and Settler, 25 June 1924): a seedling growing by a creek on Maria Ann Smith's farm at Eastwood, shown to Edwin Small and his father in 1868, which she said had grown from the remains of French crab apples grown in Tasmania; the variety "recognised as a fixed mutation or 'sport'"; shown as "Smith's seedling" at the Castle Hill show in 1890; named as suitable for export by Albert H. Benson in 1895; Maria Smith's death on 9 March 1870.
  36. New Zealand celebrates 200 years of apples and pears, FreshPlaza, 2020-03-10. Supports: the first apple and pear trees in New Zealand planted at Kerikeri by the missionary Samuel Marsden in 1819.
  37. The apple industry, Joy Stephens, The Prow (Nelson and Tasman regional history), 2011, updated 2022-02-15. Supports: William Cullen's apple orchard at Richmond in 1845; Tasman one of New Zealand's main pipfruit producers by the 1920s; about 114,000 cases shipped from the Māpua wharf in the 1925 season, about a third of New Zealand's export fruit; the millionth case of the Nelson district's apples presented to Lord Rutherford in the 1934 season.
  38. La sociedad de la manzana chichera. Chiloé, 1849–1924, Amalia Castro San Carlos, Rivar 7(20): 145–162, Redalyc, 2020. Supports: Chiloé occupied by Spain from 1567 until 1826; nine apple varieties named in documents of Chile's Central Valley from the eighteenth century; apple trees, grown for chicha, as valuable property in the wills and inventories of Chiloé, 1849–1924; thirteen traditional Chiloé varieties descended from the first trees acclimatised there in colonial times.
  39. La fruticultura en el Alto Valle de Río Negro: origen, auge y deterioro, 1930–1965, Andrés Vera, América Latina en la Historia Económica 29(2), SciELO, 2022. Supports: apple and pear growing in the Alto Valle beginning in the 1930s; the British railway company Ferrocarril Sud (the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway) financing half of the irrigation works begun in 1911 and promoting the Cinco Saltos agricultural station in 1918; the typical grower with seven to ten irrigated hectares.
  40. Malus, Flora of China vol. 9, Gu Cuizhi and Stephen A. Spongberg, Flora of China, eFloras.org, 2003. Supports: "About 55 species: widely distributed in N temperate zone; 25 species (15 endemic) in China".
  41. Bringing the apple home, Apples & People (The Brightspace Foundation). Supports: Nevius and his wife Helen moving to Yantai, then called Chefoo, in 1871; the credit given to him for bringing thirteen apple varieties to China, including Gravenstein, Yellow Bellflower and Roxbury Russet.
  42. The Life of John Livingston Nevius, pp. 429–431: introducing foreign fruits, Helen S. Coan Nevius (New York: Fleming H. Revell), Internet Archive, 1895. Supports: Nevius finding the fruits of Shantung mostly very poor; varieties sent for from the United States and Europe; the South Garden, known as the "foreign fruit garden"; grafts and scions given free to anyone who asked; his letter of 14 September 1887 on fruit propagated from his garden coming into the market, and visitors from Shanghai paying "twenty-five or thirty cents a pound" for foreign apples and pears.
  43. About apples (in Japanese), National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO), 2010-11-19. Supports: small, sour apples reaching Japan from China after the Heian period, of a different kind from today's; seedlings of Western apples imported from America in the Meiji era; Fuji, bred by NARO's fruit tree research institute, making up more than half of Japan's apple production.
  44. History of Aomori apples (in Japanese), Aomori Prefecture Apple Countermeasures Council (official Aomori apple site). Supports: Western apples introduced to Japan in 1871 (Meiji 4); three saplings from the Home Ministry's industrial promotion bureau planted in the grounds of the prefectural office in spring 1875 (Meiji 8), followed in autumn 1875 and spring 1876 by several hundred more, tried by farmers; the American missionary John Ing, invited to a private school in Hirosaki in 1874, sharing apples with his pupils at Christmas, said to be the first introduction of Western apples to the prefecture; Kikuchi Tatee, who distributed the first seedlings around Tsugaru, called the founder of Aomori apples.
  45. East Malling's history, NIAB. Supports: the East Malling and Wye Fruit Experimental Station founded in 1913 with the support of local fruit growers; rootstocks among its most widely adopted work.
  46. A short history of food research, Quadram Institute, 2017. Supports: the first systematic studies of the gas storage of fruit, by Franklin Kidd and Cyril West at Cambridge from 1920; the first commercial gas store for apples, built by a grower near Canterbury in 1929; 200 commercial gas stores for apples in the UK by 1938; R. Gane's proof in 1934 that ripening apples and pears give off ethylene.
  47. Controlled atmosphere storage of apples (ERS-276), Ben H. Pubols, Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, 1966. Supports: controlled-atmosphere storage lowering the oxygen in the air to slow ripening; McIntosh kept for 7 to 8 months; the commercial use of controlled atmosphere for apples in the United States beginning "over a quarter century ago"; more than a fifth of the apples in cold storage on 31 October, in both 1964 and 1965, held in controlled atmosphere.
  48. History of the PRI apple breeding program, J. Janick, Acta Horticulturae 595: 55–60, International Society for Horticultural Science, 2002. Supports: crosses of cultivated apples with crab apples by C. S. Crandall at the University of Illinois early in the twentieth century; L. Fredric Hough noticing scab resistance in this material in 1943; the collaboration from 1945 of Purdue, Rutgers and Illinois, with a modified backcross programme; by 2000, 18 scab-resistant cultivars carrying the Vf gene from Malus floribunda 821 released by the programme alone or with others, and about 50 cultivars from its material released by breeders worldwide.
  49. Disease-resistant apple cultivars developed from the apple breeding program at the University of Illinois (Bulletin 790), S. S. Korban and P. A. O'Connor, University of Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, IDEALS, 1990. Supports: the cross of Malus floribunda 821 with Rome Beauty, two scab-resistant seedlings of which began the programme in 1945; Prima, the first cultivar, released in 1970; the PRI prefix from Purdue, Rutgers and Illinois.
  50. FAOSTAT: Production: Crops and livestock products, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Updated 31 December 2025. Supports: apple production (item 515), in tonnes: World 17,053,651 (1961) and 97,880,076 (2024); United States 2,584,000, Italy 2,167,000 and France 2,142,000 in 1961, the largest that year; China 167,000 (1961); China, mainland 51,285,100 (2024); United States 4,922,840, Türkiye 4,420,185, Poland 3,384,500 and India 2,625,899 (2024), the largest after mainland China. Cited in the form FAO asks: FAO. 2025. FAOSTAT: Production: Crops and livestock products. [Accessed on 26 October 2026]. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL. Licence: CC-BY-4.0..
  51. 1788: First apple trees in Tasmania, Australian Food Timeline. Supports: the statement that Bligh planted seven apple trees at Adventure Bay in 1788.
  52. How the famed Granny Smith apple came from a 'chance seedling' in Eastwood, Isabella Ross, ABC News, 2025-04-19. Supports: Daniel Tan of the University of Sydney: the Granny Smith "thought to have resulted from a chance hybridisation" between the domesticated apple and the crab apple, and to have "originated from a natural seedling rather than a deliberate cross".