Apples

Apples are in the family Rosaceae and constitute the genus Malus. It is speculated that the cradle of the apple is in Asia Minor and that the fruit resulted from a millennia-old evolutionary cross of an Asiatic crab apple and a European crab apple. The science and study of the apple is “pomology,” a word that also applies to the study of fruit in general.

Malus pumila, the domestic apple we know from supermarket shelves, is not a native fruit of America. A few native crab apples, notably M. augustifolia and M. coronaria, were found by the colonists. Seeds, buds, and small plants of the apples of the British Isles and Europe trickled into the temperate zones of the New World to establish the apple as a food commodity. By the middle of the seventeenth century, there were apple orchards with thousands of trees, planted not for eating but for cider production.