Meet me under the old apple tree is a fine art photograph taken at Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service) in Cornish, New Hampshire but this subject can be found all across New England.
Old apple orchards either preserved as fruit baring trees, as ornamental trees or left to go wild can be found all across rural New England.
Take a walk in the New England woods and you’ll no doubt stumble across evidence of human presence that’s very much alive: apple trees.
Central Asian natives, apples usefulness as food led humans to plant them around the globe. European colonists brought them to the New World in the early 1600s. At one time, almost every New England farm had a few apple trees. Apples can be eaten fresh, stored for a long time, dried and even made into alcoholic beverages as well as pressed into cider drinks.
The woods of New England are dotted with relic apple trees – old, gnarled trunks hollowed by rot, leaning over as though tired – stretching out towards the sun as other trees have invaded what was once a farm field or sheep pasture. Naturally one might assume that these trees were planted. If you are near any ancient or modern settlement, you’d be correct.
Artwork mentioned in this article:
Beyond the wild apple trees one finds in the woods which are barely handing and probably are not baring much fruit, thriving apple orchards still dot the rural landscape across New England producing a variety of apple types and offering visitors pick your own experiences as well as providing crop apples for stores, for cider mills, apple sauce, apple wine and other products.
The old trees, aggressively cut back to keep them producing and to keep them short enough to harvest, creates some amazing “bonsai” type specimens. Once while living on Mount Desert Island, an older rich man purchased one of these 100 year old apple trees to decorate his mansion near Acadia National Park.
He paid something like $50,000 for the tree and then another $50,000 to move it to his property. A crew of power trucks had to cut the power and replace it behind the tree as it moved the 10 miles from farm to house.
They tried doing it early in the morning to avoid inconveniencing people traveling from on and off the island over the one connecting causeway but ended up snarling up traffic for hours.
BANGOR, Maine – A Texas billionaire plans to run ads in four area newspapers apologizing for a 10-hour traffic jam that stranded thousands of motorists along the only highway to and from Mount Desert Island.
“This has truly been a massive mess,” supermarket magnate Charles Butt told the Bangor Daily News today from his San Antonio office, where he runs the H. E.Butt Grocery Co. “I’m embarrassed by it and very sorry.”
Traffic was snarled Thursday along U.S. 1A and Route 3 as local contractors hauled a 50-year-old apple tree from Ellsworth to Butt’s waterfront estate in Northeast Harbor.
The tree, which measured 30 feet by 20 feet, took up both sides of the two-lane road. Telephone, electrical and cable TV crews had to ride ahead and lift wires so the tree could pass under. The contractors hired a police escort, but there was no police traffic control or even a warning to the public about when and how long the tree transport would take.
The tree was so wide that even the shoulder of the road was blocked.