Eponymous Foods – Autumn Apple Edition

The eponymous Bramley and McIntosh apples are both lucky accidents, and both of them have stories which stretch from the early 19th century into present day. 

Research:

• Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Ann Radcliffe". Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jul. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ann-Radcliffe-English-author
• Radcliffe, Ann. “The Romance of the Forest, interspersed with some pieces of poetry.” London. 1824. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/64701/pg64701-images.html
• Facer, Ruth. “Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823).” Chawton House Library. 2012. http://www.chawtonhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ann-Radcliffe.pdf
• Dugdale, John. “Happy 250th, Ann Radcliffe.” The Guardian. Oct. 31, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/31/ann-radcliffe-gothic-pioneer-snubbed-horace-walpole-the-castle-of-oronto-250-years-celebrations#:~:text=Another%20250th%20anniversary%2C%20of%20Ann,sent%20up%20in%20Northanger%20Abbey.
• Flood, Allison. “Gothic fiction pioneer Ann Radcliffe may have been inspired by mother-in-law.” The Guardian. Jan. 30, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/30/ann-radcliffe-gothic-fiction-mother-in-law
• “Mr. Radcliffe … “ Sunday Dispatch/ London. October 30, 1825. https://www.newspapers.com/image/813446539/?terms=%22Ann%20Radcliffe%22&match=1
• Clarke, N. (2005). Anna Seward: Swan, Duckling or Goose?. In: Batchelor, J., Kaplan, C. (eds) British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595972_3
• Norton, Rictor. “Mistress of Udolpho.” Leicester University Press. 1999.
• Thomas, Donald. “Queen of Terrors.” The Guardian. July 10, 1964. https://www.newspapers.com/image/259612656/?terms=%22Ann%20Radcliffe%22&match=1
• Townshend, D., & Wright, A. (2014). Gothic and Romantic engagements The critical reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850. In D. Townshend & A. Wright (Eds.), Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic(pp. 3-32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139507448.003
• Schwertfeger, S. 'No spoilers, please': the crux of illustrating the explained Gothic without explaining the mystery. Palgrave Commun3, 16 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-017-0018-z
• Scott, Sir Walter. “The Lives of the Novelists.” London. 1906. Accessed online: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=DXPPAAAAMAAJ&rdid=book-DXPPAAAAMAAJ&rdot=1

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Fall is finally here,
the beast time of the year. We're not quite into

(00:23):
October yet, so it's I mean, it's always spooky season
for me, but I thought maybe it would be good
to do something that is fall horrific, but not necessarily
in the ghosts and gothic things. Right, Hey, you know
what fits the bill apples Apples, So today is an

(00:44):
installment of eponymous foods that is the Autumn Apple edition.
We're going to talk about two different very popular apples,
neither of which is native to the US. Both of
them were lucky accidents, as many apple varieties are. Both
of them have stories which stretch from the early nineteenth
century right up into present day. Just as a level

(01:06):
set in case anybody doesn't remember their fruit tree information.
The thing about apples which came up when we talked
about Granny Smith on our first Eponymous Food episode, Okay,
apples can normally only reproduce when they're pollinated by another
apple tree, at least in the wild. You can do
grafting and other types of things in nursery situations. But

(01:30):
so when a variety is found that's unique, it has
to be manually propagated through grafting or else you're gonna
lose that particular type of apple when that original tree dies.
So in both of the stories that we're talking about today,
there is one original tree, which I love. So the
first apple we're going to talk about is the Bramley apple,

(01:53):
and that's the most popular cooking apple in the UK.
It's not one that most people I would probably enjoy
raw because raw it is very sour, but once it's
cooked it has a light sweetness and an almost fluffy texture.
So it's used a lot in dessert baking, think things

(02:13):
like pies, tarts, things like that. You can also use
this apple to make ciders and fruit wines. Yeah, I've
heard some people describe it. I have never cooked with
a Bramley. Describe it as becoming almost frothy when you
cook it, and I'm like, maybe I should start cooking
with Bramley's. As I mentioned just a moment ago, all
Bramley apples can be traced back to one tree. That

(02:35):
tree can still be visited today, but we're going to
talk about its current status in a moment. The tree
has a very charming beginning because it is said to
have been planted by a teenage girl. Sometimes the way
this is written about it sounds like she is a child,
but if you do the math, she was like seventeen
or eighteen when this happened. That girl, Mary Ann Brailsford,

(02:57):
took several apple pips left over from her mother's kitchen
cooking and decided to plant them in pots to germinate them,
and then transplanted the resulting seedlings into the family yard
in Subtle Nottinghamshire, and the one that became famous grew
into a small sapling and then into a tree which
produced apples that cooked up just beautifully. That tree is

(03:20):
a triploid. It has three sets of chromosomes. Triploid plants
get some great benefits from their chromosomeal structure. They typically
are more vigorous growers, they have darker leaves, and in
the case of fruit bearing trees, they often produce more
and larger fruit than their counterparts. And that triploid tree

(03:40):
was the result of a random cross pollination. We don't
have any idea what varieties were involved to create its
uniquely perfect baking apples. As we mentioned, Marianne was young
when she planted this tree. Usually this is dated to
eighteen o nine. Then she grew up and got married
and moved away from the house, and in eighteen forty

(04:01):
six a butcher named Matthew Bramley bought this property and
its apple trees, which at that point were fully mature
trees regularly producing apples, and they were so bountiful that
a local nurseryman named Henry Meriweather noticed them and eventually
approached Bramley about these trees. Calling Merriweather a nurseryman, that

(04:23):
sort of makes it seem like he was an adult.
He was actually only seventeen at the time, but he
knew a lot about plants and agriculture because he worked
in his family's nursery from the time he was a
young boy. Yeah, I read one account that said that
he had been working with fruit growing tree since he
was like ten years old. So there's also a weird

(04:43):
side story in one account that he first encountered the
apples when like a clergyman was carrying a basket of
them and I couldn't find any any other validation of that,
so if you see it maybe, But he did get
to the apple tree, which is the important thing, wasted
those apples, and then he asked if he could take
a cutting to try to graft it, and Bramley said

(05:05):
he could. He gave his consent on one condition. If
Merriweather developed the apple variety and started selling it through
his nursery, it had to be named the Bramley Apple.
And Meriweather agreed to those terms and started working with
his cuttings. That was in eighteen fifty six. So Meriweather
spent the next several decades working with the fruit. As

(05:27):
he noted, he quote worked all the plants I had
room for, and by degrees I had a fine stock
of young plants. As a side note, Mary Brailsford had
died four years before Merriweather and Bramley met, so she
never knew the fame her little tree would achieve. In
eighteen sixty two, Henry sold his first Bramley apples to

(05:48):
a customer. Sales records indicate that he sold three fruit
for two shillings on October thirty first of that year.
That sale was to a mister George Cooper of Upton Hall.
Two of the grafted trees Meriweather had developed were sold
to another gardener in eighteen sixty five. In December of
eighteen seventy six, so a little bit later, Henry Meriweather

(06:12):
showed his apples to the Royal Horticultural Society for the
first time. They received a rating of highly commended and
then later were given the rating of first Class. At
some point in the early nineteen hundreds, the Bramley tree
was struck by lightning. By some accounts, it was actually
knocked down, but it rerooted itself and survived the ordeal.

(06:34):
The Bramley apple had become so popular that by nineteen
twenty four, an estimated eighty percent of the apples grown
in Kent were Bramley's. In the second half of the
twentieth century and into the twenty first, a woman named
Nancy Harrison became the tree's guardian. She bought the two
cottages and property at auction in the nineteen sixties. Mary

(06:57):
lived on the property in what became known as the
Brand Family tree House or the adjacent cottage for the
rest of her life. Yeah some accounts put her in
just one of the cottages, and some say she moved,
so I'm not clear on that, just FYI. In the
early nineteen nineties the trees age was really beginning to show.
It also had developed honey fungus. So this is a

(07:20):
blanket name for several types of Armilaria fungus that destroy
woody and perennial plants from the root. So it displays
as a white fungal growth that appears between the wood
and its bark. It sort of separates the two and
causes problems. Sometimes trees that are infected with this will
grow mushrooms, typically in the autumn. The upper parts of

(07:41):
the plant may die, and the leaves that it will
produce if it does continue to, will be smaller than normal.
They also turn kind of a yellowy or pale green
color underground. The roots are slowly rotting from this fungus
and treatment options are not very good. There is no
way to get rid of honey fungus. Normally, if a

(08:01):
plant or tree has it, the course of action would
be to dig it up and burn it so that
that fungus won't spread, But no one wants to destroy
the Bramley tree. Biologists from the University of Nottingham stepped
in and then, in addition to providing supportive care for
this tree to keep it alive as long as possible,
they also undertook a project to clone it that was

(08:24):
supervised by Professor Ted Cocking and doctor Brian Power of
the School of Biology. In an article the University released
in two thousand and nine, they described this process quote
shoot tips were taken from the original Bramley tree in
the spring of nineteen ninety. These were cut into smaller
pieces and treated to eliminate all bacteria, fungi and fungal

(08:45):
spores which are always present, particularly in an old tree
like the original Bramley. The inactive leaf buds were then
removed and placed in a liquid nutrient growth medium, changing
to fresh medium every four weeks. When the individual roots
reached three centimeters, they were ready for rooting in a
new growth medium. These rooted clones were then transferred to

(09:08):
soil in a mist propagator and then to an open glasshouse.
The paper explained that rooted clones versus grafts, can grow
quickly and reach a height of six to eight feet
in a couple of years. There are twelve Bramley clones
that are part of the University Park Millennium Garden, and

(09:29):
there are always shoots being cultivated and distributed to nurseries
to keep this line alive. There's also one clone planted
next to the original. I was just idly wondering how
close to the original. It's not super close, like when
you see pictures of the original tree. You can't see
the other tree in the picture. Oh I see, yeah, yeah.

(09:50):
And also I presume they probably have some ground level
barriers involved as well. There are some interesting side benefits
to the cloning work done from the original tree. So
prior to this project, any Bramley tree that was grown
outside of the original site was of course a grafted cutting,
and most were grafted cuttings taken from prior grafted cutting,

(10:13):
so over time the flavor of the resulting apples had
faded a little bit. But the cloned trees taste just
like the original, and by some accounts even better because
they are young trees, so they're producing sweeter fruit and
they have more vitamin C than the grafted ones. The
clone trees have a more compact shape. Growers who have

(10:34):
received the cloned saplings have often expressed doubt about them,
initially saying they look kind of like tomato plants, and
then they are just happily surprised at how rapidly they
mature and how hardy they are, and they're really really
impressive fruit production. In two thousand and nine, in honor
of the trees By Centennial, there was a huge celebration

(10:54):
and a stained glass window featuring the tree was designed
by Helen Whittaker of Bartos, York. This was dedicated in
the Subtle Minister Cathedral. Coming up, we'll talk about some
ongoing issues with the tree and efforts that are being
made to take care of it, but first we will
pause for a sponsor break. In recent years, the original

(11:24):
Bramley Tree has continued to have some challenges. Nancy Harrison,
the woman we mentioned that's been caretaking it for so long,
died in twenty fourteen at the age of ninety four,
and her nephew, Colson Howard, became the owner and steward
of the tree. While Howard, who was fifty five when
his aunt died, kept a garden, he did not feel
qualified to care for a historic tree, especially one that

(11:48):
everyone knows has serious issues, so he got assistance from
tree experts, many of whom had also helped his aunt
then shown the tree a great deal of care over
the years. In twenty sixteen, the BBC reported on the
honey fungus problem, which was deemed untreatable. Howard told the
news outlet quote, it's all very sad. The tree has

(12:08):
honey fungus, and I have asked everybody if there is
a treatment. All the advice seems to be that it
is fatal in the long term once it has died.
I would like to preserve the tree where it stands
for as long as possible. As an aside, Many mentions
of this tree suggest the twenty teens as the time
when it developed honey fungus, but the University of Nottingham

(12:30):
lists the nineteen nineties, and for them who have cultivated
fully mature trees, that earlier date makes a lot more sense. Yeah,
it gets a little confused in the telling sometimes. Professor
Ted Cocking, who we mentioned before, he worked on the
cloning project and he works on the ongoing care of
the tree told the press quote, it looks as though
it is going to die, although we can never be

(12:50):
one hundred percent certain with a tree. It is a
great shame. Miss Harrison devoted most of her life to
looking after the tree and entertaining people who came from
all over the world to visit the tree. Even if
it is dying, we all want it to die with dignity.
It needs to be nursed in its terminal years. In
twenty eighteen, Nottingham Trent University acquired the property where the

(13:13):
tree is and its two cottages to expand its student
housing and in the process the university also became the
custodian of the tree and this has meant that the
Biology department can carefully monitor the tree's health and work
to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible.
In twenty twenty two, as part of the celebration of

(13:34):
Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee, His Royal Highness the Prince of
Wales begin a project for the Queen's Green Canopy, and
as part of this effort, seventy woodlands and seventy ancient
trees in the UK were selected to be part of
a network of growth called the Ancient Canopy. Those seventies
were to mark the seventy years of the Queen's reign,

(13:55):
and the Bramley Tree was selected as one of the trees.
Today there are about three hundred different growers growing Bramley
apples in the UK, producing more than eighty three thousand
tons of apples every year. This tree is still alive
and is still producing fruit. It will eventually die, although

(14:15):
it gets extraordinary care. It does still have honey fungus
and it's more than two hundred years old. But another
scientific effort is underway to preserve everything possible about the
tree's DNA. There's a research project taking place at Nottingham
Trent University. It's working to quote complete Bramley tree genomic
DNA sequencing and mapping and in addition to creating a

(14:37):
scientific record of the tree's genetic makeup, this will help
scientists identify the genetic information that creates some specific qualities
and plants which could maybe be useful in future agricultural efforts.
The Bramley tree has its own blue historical plaque which
reads the Bramley Apple tree was grown from a pip

(14:57):
by a young lady, Mary Ann Brailsford between eighteen oh
nine and eighteen fifteen. It was thought it came from
an apple grown on a tree at the bottom of
her garden. Now number seventy five, that's the street number
one seedling produced very fine apples in eighteen thirty seven,
when the new occupier was mister Matthew Bramley. A local gardener,

(15:17):
Henry Merriweather later obtained permission to take cuttings from the
tree and it was duly registered as the Bramley seedling.
So what I love about this is even though the
butcher who lived at seventy five Church Streets, southled Nottinghamshire
in the mid eighteen hundreds did not plant or cultivate
the Bramley tree in its apples, all he said was
sure you could take it. They still bear his name.

(15:40):
It's just kind of the least involved eponymous food story
we can. Next up is the Macintosh apple. This variety
is well known all over the world for its bright
red skin with tinges of green, and the crisp flesh,
which has a flavor that's both sweet and tart. These
are often eaten raw, but they're still also very popular

(16:03):
for cooking because they break down easily under heat, so
that shortens the cooking time. Yeah, you can bake an
apple pie with those a little bit faster. John McIntosh
was born on August fifteenth, seventeen seventy seven, in Harpersfield,
New York. His parents, Alexander and Juliette McIntosh, were Scottish immigrants,
so you will sometimes see John called a Scottish Canadian

(16:25):
because he moves in a moment, and sometimes an American Canadian,
just in case you see both. That's the explainer. Alexander
McIntosh moved to Harpersfield four years before John was born,
and he was a loyalist during the Revolutionary War. As
a young man, John moved to the colony of Upper Canada,
that's the precursor to modern day Ontario. Upper Canada was

(16:48):
formed in seventeen ninety one by the Constitutional Act of
seventeen ninety one, which separated what had been the province
of Quebec into Upper Canada and Lower Canada. Lower Canada,
which was largely Catholic and French speaking, would later become
modern day Quebec, and then Upper Canada was mostly Protestant,
English speaking and loyalist. John is said to have made

(17:11):
this move after a fallout with his family, which happened
due to his relationship with a woman who was deemed unacceptable.
Whoever that woman was, she does not appear to have
gone with him. Yeah, there's some question marks around that
whole thing. Exactly when John McIntosh moved to Upper Canada

(17:31):
is also a little fuzzy. Some accounts list his arrival
as seventeen ninety six. That's the earliest date you'll typically see.
Others put it in the early eighteen hundreds. It seems possible,
and I most historians have reconciled this as a result
of him moving from one location to another. So different
municipalities records are reflecting their own arrival dates, and depending

(17:55):
on which one of those you reference, you will see
something different he did once he was there, Mary, a
woman named Hannah Dorian, and the macintoshes, and I was
not able to verify this, are said to have had
eleven children, six boys and five girls. I didn't find
any info on like whether that was the true number,
whether they all lived to adulthood, et cetera. One of

(18:15):
his sons becomes very important in the story, though The
Dictionary of Canadian Biography cites the date of March eighth,
eighteen thirteen as the day John purchased a lot of
land in Matilda Township in the Saint Lawrence Valley, which
would eventually become the town of Dundela. This is the
only place Holly saw that night. Every everywhere else seems
to say this was in eighteen eleven. In any case, though,

(18:38):
he started clearing the land to grow crops there, and
it said that in doing so he found apple seedlings.
This story has some hazy edges. Once again, this might
have been one seedling, maybe multiple. It also might not
have been John. It could have been his son Alan,
although an account from Allan himself credits his father. We'll

(19:00):
get back to that in a minute. Some versions of
this story say that John found quite a few seedlings
in the brush while clearing this property and then replanted
a lot of them, but then only one survived and
was the foundation of the Macintosh apple line. As with
the Bramley, we don't really know what kind of hybridization
this original seedling had. Yeah, there are some efforts to

(19:23):
figure it out we'll talk about in a minute. But
as late as eighteen seventy six, it kind of seems
if you're looking at some records, like there weren't any
growers including McIntosh apples in their orchards in Ontario. That
information comes from the Centennial Exposition of eighteen seventy six,
which took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and according to the

(19:44):
Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry on John McIntosh, there was
an exhibit there mounted by the Ontario Fruit Growers, but
the Macintosh was not listed as a variety of fruit
grown in the province. But there is some counter evidence
to that, and we'll dig into it and get the
story in Alan McIntosh's own words after we hear from

(20:05):
the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class
going on April ninth, eighteen seventy four, so two years
before the centennial Expo we mentioned before the break, a
column of entries about the apple tree appeared in the

(20:27):
Argus and Patriot newspaper of Montpelier, Vermont, under the heading
the Macintosh read apple and this column. And when I
say that, I mean like a full column of the paper,
not it's a column written by someone. Opens with a
letter from Johnson Alan McIntosh, dated February fifteenth of that year,
outlining the differences between the Macintosh and another apple. That

(20:50):
letter is long, but it includes a lot of information
about the tree as known to the macintosh family and
other growers over what seems like a significant period of time,
as well as the family's version of the origin story.
So I'm going to read the whole thing. It reads
as follows, mister Webster, Dear sir, I received yours of
the tenth asking relative to my apple and tree, whether

(21:13):
it was the famous or some other variety. Sir, it
appears that the famouz is called here the snow apple. Now,
the Macintosh reds are not the snow variety. In the
first place, the meats of the two are not alike.
The snow are much whiter. Again, the snow apple does
not stay on the tree in the fall like the
red variety. The snow falls with early frosts and the leaves. Also,

(21:38):
the reds stay in the trees until the ground freezes,
and also the leaves. Again, the reds are very smooth,
while the snow has a very rough bark. Again, the
limbs are very different. The snow are very liable to
split down, while the red does not for the reason
it cannot. The limbs come out like pins, being smooth
with no seam both in crotch and big limbs that

(21:59):
say there is no tree like them in this respect. Again,
the tree is a constant bearer. Now, Sir, I am
quite positive. There is no man living who has even
known this tree to fail one year of bearing a
good crop of apples. I am fifty eight years old,
and do know for fifty years it has borne every
year without fail a single year in that time. Also,

(22:21):
the young trees are just as good bearers, yes, sir,
every year. Further, the frosts, which are frequent here in
the climate in blossoming time, do not affect my reds
in the least, while the snow, or yet any other
kind do. In Canada, the red apple is much larger,
some of them weighing a pound. Again, the snow variety
will not keep near as long. Also, the snow loses

(22:43):
its flavor and becomes insipid, while the red does not.
It holds its flavor until Midsummer perfectly now, sir. Relative
to the tree, it was set by my father where
it now stands, some seventy years ago, with some twenty more,
which were taken up by the roadside or wherever he
could find them, and put in his garden. And in
the course of thirty years all the rest were dead

(23:05):
and gone. I grafted this kind into some other varieties
some thirty or forty years ago. The tops of which
are now smooth and bright as a young tree. Now,
I would say I have set an orchard of twelve
hundred trees of this variety, considering one of these trees
worth four times as much as any other trees for
this climate. For I have never known one of them

(23:26):
to die from any cause. Yours respectfully, Alan McIntosh. So
if that sounds like a sales pitch, sort of is.
But this is not the start of the family selling
the trees to other growers. In fact, there's a statement
about the quality of the trees and Alan McIntosh's honesty
in the same column of entries that signed by sixteen growers,

(23:49):
and several of them include their own testimonials about the
Macintosh red and their experiences growing them. So there were
clearly orchards in Ontario that were growing these before eighteen
seventy six. One of these growers, William Arrington, states that
he has been growing McIntosh reds for five years. Another

(24:09):
orchard SS Clow and Son of Braintree, Vermont said, in
their testimonial quote, we understand that some parties are claiming
they can furnish the same tree. Now if they will
furnish the same tree not raised in the Macintosh nursery,
we will give one hundred dollars. So clearly, not only
was the McIntosh being grown and sold by other growers

(24:31):
at the time, but it had a really good reputation
that had reached well outside of Ontario. There are we
should point out some inconsistencies in Allen's account with the
historical record, though in particular, he mentions that his father
planted the first Macintosh seventy years prior, but John McIntosh
didn't own that land until eighteen eleven or eighteen thirteen,

(24:52):
depending on the source you look at. Either way, sixty
seems like a more accurate number than seventy. Remember, this
was being written in in eighteen seventy four, but John
himself had been dead for almost thirty years when Allan's
letter was published, so it's not entirely surprising that some
of the historical dates probably just passed down through the

(25:13):
family verbally were noted incorrectly. The elder Macintosh's exact date
of death is not certain, but he died sometime between
the fall of eighteen forty five in the beginning of
eighteen forty six. By the end of the nineteenth century
and into the early twentieth century, the Macintosh's popularity grew rapidly.
It was as Alan's statement indicated, a hearty apple that

(25:36):
survived the cold well and produced a lot of sweet fruit.
One of the only flaws noted about it was that
this fruit bruised easily. Some accounts credit the robust health
of the macintosh with enabling more orchardists to develop commercial farms.
Alan died in eighteen ninety nine, so he was only
able to see the early success of this apple that

(25:58):
he had nursed and developed in promoted his whole life,
and just as that success was reaching a crescendo, the
original McIntosh apple tree was damaged by a fire. It
didn't recover and it eventually collapsed, and at the time
the tree was given a memorial headstone placed at the
base of the remaining stump, which reads the site of
the original McIntosh apple Tree eighteen eleven to nineteen oh six.

(26:23):
Another stone marker was placed near the road in nineteen twelve,
noting that the farm was the location of the original
macintosh apple tree. In nineteen sixty two, a historical marker
was placed outside the homestead by the Ontario Heritage Foundation.
It lists eighteen eleven, not eighteen thirteen, as the year
John McIntosh acquired the land. The pla'x version of the

(26:45):
story is brief, and it reads in full quote John
McIntosh seventeen seventy seven to eighteen forty six. McIntosh's parents
immigrated from Inverness, Scotland, to the Mohawk Valley, New York,
and John moved to Upper Canada in seventeen ninety six.
In eighteen eleven he acquired a farm near this site,
and while clearing the land of second growth, discovered several

(27:05):
apple seedlings. He transplanted these, and one bore the superior fruit,
which became famous as the Macintosh read apple. John's son, Alan,
established a nursery and promoted this new species extensively. It
was widely acclaimed in Ontario and the northern United States,
and was introduced into British Columbia about nineteen ten. Its

(27:28):
popularity in North America and propagation in many lands attest
the initiative and industry of John McIntosh and his descendants.
There are some people who think John McIntosh gets a
little too much credit in all of this, and that
Alan should be the one that everyone talks about, just Fyi.
In nineteen seventy, efforts were made to see if the
Macintosh could be proven to have been a descendant of

(27:50):
the famouz Or snow apple that Alan McIntosh referenced in
his letter to the paper. A lot of apple experts
have concluded that the Famous, which was in the region
when John McIntosh moved there, had to be a genetic ancestor.
But in nineteen seventy W. H. Upshaw of the Horticultural
Experiment Station in Vineland, Ontario, conducted experiments to see if

(28:13):
he could cross the Famous with other breeds to get
anything close to a Macintosh, but he never could. Based
on his work, he listed the fall Saint Lawrence Apple
and the Alexander apple as likely progenitors. In two thousand
and one, another plaque was installed, this time by the
Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. This plaque also

(28:36):
supports that eighteen to eleven date and it reads quote
In eighteen eleven, John McIntosh discovered an apple sapling on
his land in Matilda Township. By bringing about its propagation
and wide dissemination, he and his family had a significant
impact on Canada's fruit growing industry. The Macintosh apple not
only possessed a highly desirable taste, texture, aroma, and appearance,

(28:59):
who was also's so ideally suited for growing in the
country's colder climate. A number of well known hybrids, such
as the Cortland's Empire, Lobo and Spartan were derived from
this fruit. The macintosh has become one of the most
popular varieties grown in Canada and abroad. The second plaque
was not installed at the Macintosh Farm, but instead at

(29:21):
a nearby park which is also named McIntosh Park. In
twenty eleven, the last known Macintosh apple tree that was
a first generation graft from the original tree was cut
down on July twenty fifth after it died. According to
the owner of the property, Sandra Bexted, the summer had
just been too dry for the aging tree. It produced

(29:43):
some leaves before it died, but they fell off as
it reached its end. The tree had been grown from
cuttings from the original by Sandra's great grandfather, Samuel Smith,
who They still have that orchard and it still functions
once again. Scientists stepped in horticulture lists from the Upper
Canada village, collected twigs from the tree before it was

(30:04):
cut down and grafted them onto rootstock. Three of those
took root, and they were headed to an orchard in
the village once they grew large enough. The Macintosh farm
where it all began has also had some challenges. In
twenty eighteen, a story ran on CBC News about the
state of the property. At that point, it was owned
by a man from Austria named Gerd Scoff, who had

(30:27):
bought it in nineteen eighty seven and was eager to
sell it. The orchard and the farmland were a lot
to manage. He was also ready to move on. In
addition to how big and hard to care for this
property was, it was also just too remote. He wanted
to live closer to a hospital as he and his
wife got older, in case they ever had any kind

(30:47):
of emergency. At the time, he was asking for eight
hundred and seventy five thousand Canadian dollars. According to a
BBC report about the farm, that was equivalent to six
hundred and seventy five thousand dollars US or five hundred
and fourteen thousand British pounds. The property was listed as
five point five hectares that's a little bigger than thirteen

(31:09):
and a half acres. The farmhouse and its surrounding structures
had really fallen into disrepair. There were frequent visitors from animals,
unwanted animal visitors, we will say, and occasional human break
ins as well. Scoff's moved away from the property in
twenty sixteen, and it was still vacant, so it further deteriorated.

(31:32):
According to a CBC Canada report on the land, most
of Scoff's neighbors saw that his asking price was too high.
Even other orchard owners in the area indicated that the
property had been neglected for so long that it would
just be really difficult even for a pro to get
it up and running again. Scoff was not interested in
working with the government on making the pharm a tourist destination,

(31:55):
and while he said he would not sell to the
local or federal government, there were also no offers from
those municipalities. Scoff cited his distrust of the government generally
as his reason for not wanting to work with them.
It is unclear to me if this is related to
the historic marker that was placed in the park rather
than on the property. I don't know if there was

(32:16):
like a long history there, but there have been public
calls over the years for the Macintosh to be more
fully recognized by the Ontario government as a historically significant
part of the province's heritage, but so far it has
not been deemed important enough. Even though it has appeared
on Canadian money. We don't really know if anybody has

(32:38):
ever made a real offer on this. A New York
Times article about the McIntosh apple from twenty twenty one
states that the Macintosh farm is long gone. This sites
the Smith Farm nearby as the oldest operating orchard still
offering the variety ah apples apples. Listen. Do I always

(33:01):
think I want to try to grow apple trees? Yes?
Does it ever work? No? I know who I am,
and I am a lazy gardener, but I do have
a listener mail about UV protection one of my favorite things.
This is from our listener Alyssa, who writes, Hey, ladies,
been a fan for many years now. Thank you for
all your research and well delivered information. I just wanted

(33:23):
to drop a quick note about UV protection. I'm a
conductor for a freight rail company. I'm also what you
might call pasty. I always do my best to use
as much sun protection as possible, but it's not always
possible to reapply throughout the day due to being in
the middle of the yard and either not having it
available or dirty hands. They would break my skin out.
My biggest suggestion is always wearing long sleeve shirts. As

(33:46):
you mentioned, there are some with UV protection built in.
Wearing long sleeves carries two benefits, one keeping the sun off, obviously,
but also keeping the grease and likely chemicals that are
on the cars off my skin as well, hopefully. I
often have people ask me how I can wear long
sleeves in the summer, but I swear you aren't any
hotter than you would be otherwise, if it's ninety five,

(34:07):
you're gonna be hot no matter what. It'd be worse
for it to be ninety five and have a sunburn,
and then you can't sleep at night too. I laughed
when Holly described her get up for mowing the lawn
and absolutely related. Sadly, I didn't really start properly protecting
my skin until I got tattoos, but hopefully better late
than never. And then she sent the pet tax of

(34:27):
her dog Lucy and her cat Phoenix, the absolute very cutest,
cutest and they're together and Phoenix is a torty, so
I'm surprised that she looks like a sweet little cuddler
with a puppy, because sometimes torties can have a little latitude.
She also sent a picture of herself at work fully

(34:48):
covered in all of her long sleevitude, so that is
a good point. Listen long sleep clothes again. Will I
feel like this is my soapbox lately? Everybody wears sun
protection long sleeves. We're great. If you would like to
write as you can do so at History podcast at

(35:09):
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(35:30):
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