Old Southern Apples, Revised & Expanded by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr.

Some of these are local varieties selected and propagated a hundred years ago by a Southerner who found merit in it. To get into his book, an apple must be a named variety and be identified as such by the owner of the tree, and then that identify confirmed by further research as much as possible. In an interview with Good Fruit Grower, Calhoun made it clear he’s no collector of unnamed wild seedling apples. That’s even more reason, Lee thinks, to identify and save apples that grow well in zones 7 to 9 and are better suited to growers in warmer areas. Department of Agriculture hardiness zones 5 and 6. Most modern apples are adapted to the high-chill areas of U.S. The apple paintings show two views of a fruit, one of the whole apple and the other the apple sliced in half, stem to calyx, with the name of the painter and the orchard from which it originated hand lettered on the bottom of the painting. Between 18, more than 7,700 paintings were made of American fruit and nuts. Something you learn from the book is that USDA hired artists to paint pictures of apples.

Reproduced in the book’s center are 123 paintings of apples from the USDA’s Pomological Watercolor Collection.

Old Southern Apples describes nearly 1,800 varieties of apples that originated in the South or were widely grown there. What was then a report of the New York Agricultural Experiment Station became, in Calhoun’s words, “the Bible of northern apples.” But Calhoun does have credibility in the world of apple variety conservation, and he believes the South may have a deeper apple heritage than other parts of the United States. That’s how it appears on the jacket cover of his book, Old Southern Apples, first published in 1995 but expanded and revised in a new edition released early this year.Ĭalhoun doesn’t have quite the academic credentials that horticulturist Spencer Beach had when he wrote T he Apples of New York in 1905. Moreover, it has to claim a Southern heritage.Ĭalhoun goes by the name Lee, but his full name is Creighton Lee Calhoun, Jr. But to qualify to be in his orchard, the apple tree has to be old, an heirloom, a variety that isn’t much raised anymore. The apples in Lee Calhoun’s orchard look ultra-modern, planted as they are on Budagovsky 9 rootstock and trained to trellis wires using the European oblique cordon style. Disharoon, an old, north Georgia apple thought to have been cultivated by native Americans, came to Lee Calhoun’s orchard in 1998.

Old Southern Apples, Revised & Expanded by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr.