Virginia Beauty and Her Kin

(Page 2 of 6)

October/November 1996
By Tim Hensley 
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That's good news for folks who thought they couldn't grow apples because their climate is too warm. Bad news if you think a southern belle is going to be happy in the North. ...

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BUT SADLY

of the original 1,400 varieties grown in southern orchards, 1,100 are now considered extinct.

Take the Ben Davis, for example. This apple was popular in the South after the Civil War, not so much for its taste but as a prolific and dependable bearer. When growers in the Northeast tried to duplicate its success, the results were disastrous. As Fred Lape, author of Apples and Man (Litton, 1979), relates, "[Ben Davis] did not ripen well in the North, and it had to compete with varieties like the Northern Spy and the Greening. Orchardists planted good stands of it and brought them to production, only to find that buyers bought the fruit one year and never again. There was nothing to do but tear the trees out and replace them with a variety whose flesh was not dry, coarse, and tasteless."

The other reason southern apples are not widely known (even in the South) is that many of them are not suited to the requirements of commercial orcharding. A good commercial variety must be heavy-bearing, early-bearing, disease-resistant, and vigorous. Its fruit should be large and of a striking color; it should store well and ship well.

Like coming down to the ten finalists in the Miss Georgia Pageant, run most any apple through a grid like this and it's bound to miss the cut. The Newtown Pippin, for example, is a squatty yellow apple of medium size with a susceptibility to scab when grown on clay soils—a real challenge for the commercial orchardist. Yet Thomas Jefferson, who grew this apple, wrote while visiting in Paris, "They have no apple to compare with our Newtown Pippin." Even today, when pitted in taste contests against the most flavorful types, Newtown Pippin comes out on top.

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