Would you like to own a piece of Tower Hill Botanic Garden’s history while contributing to its future? The “Buy A Tree, Give a Tree” fundraising campaign is underway. For $200 you can select an apple tree sapling grown from trees in our historic heirloom apple orchard. For this price, you’ll receive a tree of your own to be picked up in the spring and you’ll make a tax deductible contribution to the garden’s horticulture operations as we complete the renovation of our historic heirloom apple orchard.
You’ll be able to choose your tree from one of 119 heirloom varieties that are part of the Davenport Collection at Tower Hill Botanic Garden. Your tree was propagated by grafting scionwood collected from a tree in the Davenport Collection by Fedco Trees in Maine. Tower Hill began restoring this historic and important collection in 2019, when the existing trees in the collection were nearly thirty years old and showing varying signs of disease and stress that come with age. Your tree will be a two-year-old bare root branched sapling, 5 to 7 feet tall. Planting instructions will be provided at time of pick up in late winter/early spring 2021 and notification of pickup date will be emailed several weeks in advance. Bare root trees must be planted immediately following pickup.
The apple varieties you know and love don’t “come true” when grown from seed, so they are asexually or clonally propagated through the process of grafting. Grafting allows apple growers to grow desirable named varieties that have specific properties like taste, color, disease resistance, or hardiness. For example, every Macoun apple eaten today is genetically identical to the first Macoun tree named by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in 1923. Scionwood collected from that first tree where carefully spliced onto other apple trees and apple rootstocks to create more Macoun trees. If you planted a seed from your Macoun apple, the fruit from that tree might taste similar to a Macoun, but thanks to bees transporting pollen from one variety to another, the fruit you grew from seed to tree would include notes of other apple varieties.
To purchase, or to make a donation, visit https://www.towerhillbg.org/orchard/
