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174 | TASMANIAN LIFE
There’s a popular myth about apple trees. It goes like this: You eat a sweet, juicy apple – perfect in appearance and good enough for the Garden of Eden. You toss away the core and a sprout comes up. Eventually you have your very own apple tree, complete with apples just as good as the original. TASMANIAN TASMANIANLIFE LIFE| |175 175
Despite Tasmania’s reputation as the “Apple Isle,” apples are not native to the island. “All apples originate in one valley in the Tien Shan Mountains, in Kazakhstan.”
T
he problem is, this is just a myth. The original ‘perfect’ apple (the Garden of Eden apple) was not grown from a seed. It was a clone. According to Nik Magnus, co-owner of Woodbridge Fruit Trees: “If you take a Golden Delicious and take its seeds out and grow them, they will produce something very different from a Golden Delicious, and most of them will be horrible.” Once upon a time, a Golden Delicious tree turned up. Orchardists cloned it until millions of other identical trees were created with the genetic material of that one tree. This may sound a bit futuristic, but in fact the practice has been occurring at least since the times of Alexander the Great, who sent dwarf apples back from India. How is it that ancient peoples knew so much about cloning so many centuries before Dolly the sheep? And why does the intuitive method of planting a seed to grow a tree fail so miserably? Bob Magnus, Nik’s father and the founder of Woodbridge Fruit Trees, can explain. It is a chilly winter’s day at a park near Huonville and the floor of the barbecue area is littered with short bits of apple tree stems. Pieces fly off the ends of stalks as they’re cut, one after another. Some land in the fire and some hit people who are concentrating too hard on their own cuts to notice. “I’m nervous about this,” Susan Molyneux says. Susan is a customer of Food In My Backyard, a Hobart-based organisation that helps people to grow their own food. “I’m afraid I’m going to cut myself.” “Well yeah, be nervous,” is Bob Magnus’ quick reply. Bob sports a bushy beard and a beret. “It’s easy to cut yourself and it happens every time. It’s humiliating and it hurts.” This is a workshop being held for the owners, employees and customers of Food In My Back Yard, to teach them about grafting. Grafting is the process used to clone almost all types of fruit trees in the world. For a concept that initially sounds so odd, the method is actually quite simple. To clone an apple tree, you take two plant parts called the rootstock and the scion, and join them together into a single plant. The rootstock is the roots of a tree – in this case, the roots of a young tree – along with a bit of the shoot that comes up from it. The scion is a 176 176 || TASMANIAN TASMANIAN LIFE LIFE
small, thin branch from the tree being cloned. Provided this branch has access to water and nutrients, it can keep growing into a new tree that will eventually produce fruit. “When you cut a piece of living tissue like this, it wants to heal itself,” Bob says. “So when you stick two bits together, they heal together.” Thus, the plant again becomes a functional whole, with the water and nutrients sucked up into the roots, through the graft and into the scion, which grows as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “The graft begins to heal after only a couple of days,” Bob explains, “and within two months the union is fully functional.” The workshop participants practice making a straight diagonal cut at the bottom of their scion. They practice repeatedly until their scions are in tiny pieces on the floor. Bob walks around watching everyone’s cutting techniques. No one is very good at first and Bob doesn’t mind telling them so. “No, not like that! Definitely not like that. You’re doing it totally scoopy. That’s definitely totally wrong!” Vanessa Gstrein, one of the workshop participants, struggles to make her cuts straight. “See, I didn’t have a misspent youth,” she jokes. “That’s my problem.” From around the space, there are grunts of “Aw, yeah!” and “Woo-hoo!” as the participants make cut after cut. Bob approaches another woman and looks at the cut she’s just made. “That looks…acceptable.” He looks up and grins. “Gotta be diplomatic,” he says. Everyone laughs. “Why start now?” Gstrein asks. Once the group has mastered the straight diagonal cut, it’s time to move on to the real thing. Each person gathered three rootstocks earlier in the day. Bob passes out three different varieties of apple scions – an early, mid and late ripening variety –trying to match the thickness of each scion to the rootstock. “The ripening seasons of apples in Tasmania are such that if you plant the right types, you can have apples for up to six months of the year,” he explains. Bob would know. The Grove Research Station in southern Tasmania houses around 600 varieties of apples. “Two of each tree; it’s sort of a real Noah’s Ark,” he says.
When Bob Magnus first arrived in Tasmania in 1980, he began chronicling the ripening times of each apple variety, visiting the research station weekly for almost 20 years. Eventually he began taking scions off some of the varieties to grow in his own orchard at Woodbridge. “We decided [the research station] was going to close down one day, so we should have some of the varieties so we don’t have to rely on it,” he says. “It was too much to get all the varieties. I took the ones I thought had historical or cultural interest.” Now his orchard contains around 300 apple varieties, grafts of all of which are available for sale. Everyone cuts the rootstock and the scion of the first variety, a Red Astrachan, trying to match the length of the diagonal cuts on each piece so that they will align. They then cut a “tongue” a third of the way down each cut and intertwine the tongues of the rootstock and the scion so that they stay together. This is called a whip and tongue graft, one of many types. Once the two pieces are flat against each other, the participants tape up the graft. Apples are grown on rootstock for the benefits they provide to the plant. Many rootstocks are chosen for their resistance to disease. Others are chosen for their ability to suck up water and nutrients, particularly calcium, from the soil. Although rootstocks don’t change the flavour or colour of an apple, they can control how big and healthy the fruit ends up being. Rootstocks also control the size of the apple tree and contrary to popular belief, bigger is not better. “These varieties of rootstocks are designed to make trees smaller and smaller and smaller,” Bob says. What results is a marriage between the positive attributes of each plant. Today we are using an apple rootstock that was developed in England for Australian and South African conditions specifically. It is resistant to woolly aphids and limits the size of the apple tree. Left to grow on their own, apple rootstocks will, in fact, produce apples. The problem lies in the quality of apples produced by these rootstocks. Because apples grown from seed don’t take on the characteristics of the apple they were taken from, it’s highly unlikely that non-grafted apples will be any good. Despite Tasmania’s reputation as the “Apple Isle,” apples are not native to the island. “All apples originate in one valley in the
Tien Shan Mountains, in Kazakhstan,” Bob says. “We really haven’t improved on them, we’ve just chosen the varieties that suit us.” From that valley, apples spread along the border between China and Kazakhstan. The terrain in the region was so steep that horses and bears walking in the area had to follow a particular path. They ate apples they found in the valley and continued on their way. Apple seeds in their droppings sprouted and grew. While we don’t know exactly how grafting originated, it may have been simply by watching and mimicking nature. “One of the oldest forms of grafting would be things like figs intertwining their branches and forming a union on their own, just by branches touching,” Nik Magnus explains. Now the variety of apples grown is based on anything but chance. Supermarkets choose which varieties of apples to sell based on shelf life, aesthetics and mass appeal, which usually means ‘sweet’. “Modern apples are just sugar balls, aren’t they?” Bob Magnus says. “No complexity.” This also means that very few varieties of apples are consumed anymore. Supermarkets drive demand for the varieties of apples grown by orchardists, so many heritage apples are at risk of dying out. This is why Woodbridge Fruit Trees’ work selling such a wide variety of apple trees is so important. It’s the taste that really provides motivation for people to grow their own apples, though. Supermarkets pick their apples unripe, when the flavours are not fully developed. By the time they reach the consumer, they’ve been off the tree for several months. “You can’t send a ripe Cox’s Orange Pippin to England,” Bob says. “They’re picked unripe and ripened in boxes. That’s the price of our modern food industry.” At the workshop, all that’s left to be done is to pack up and sweep away the pieces of apple tree on the floor. Everyone will take his or her three grafted apple trees home to plant. In a few years, they’ll have their own fresh heritage apples – varieties they’d never find in the supermarket. “When’s the last time you bought an apple from the supermarket?” someone asks Bob Magnus. Bob laughs. “No,” he says. “It just doesn’t happen.” TASMANIAN LIFE | 177