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| John Bunker | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1950 or 1951 (age 72–73) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupations |
|
| Spouse | Cammy Watts |
John Bunker (born 1950 or 1951) is an American orchardist, pomologist, and "apple explorer". An expert on American apples and their history, he is the founder of the mail-order nursery Fedco Trees, a division of the cooperative Fedco Seeds. For most of his life, he has worked to preserve rare old apple varieties from across Maine and the New England region. In 2012, he founded the Maine Heritage Orchard in Unity, Maine, a ten-acre (4.0 ha) preservation educational orchard of Maine's historic apple and pear varieties.
Early life and education
Bunker grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and later in Palo Alto, California, where his father was a professor at Stanford University.
After first visiting Maine in summer 1962 when he was 11 years old, Bunker decided that he wanted to live there. He attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine, graduating in 1972. During his junior year, he bought (together with two college friends) some land in Palermo, Maine, where he still lives.
A few years after graduation, Bunker (who had been working various odd jobs including teaching high school English) was hired by Fedco Seeds of Clinton, Maine.
Apple activism
Bunker began picking local apples from old trees that were no longer being cultivated. He was working as a coop store manager in Belfast, Maine, when a customer brought in some Black Oxford apples to sell. (Black Oxford is a traditional Maine apple that dates back to one seedling found in 1790 in Oxford County.) These apples inspired Bunker to begin to graft and propagate scions from old apple trees. According to Bunker, "Sometimes we have an apple and we're looking for a name, and sometimes we have a name and we're looking for an apple."
In 1984, he started a mail-order catalog for heritage apple trees, with the business name of Fedco Trees. The trees are created by grafting shoots from old apple trees onto sturdy rootstock. As Mother Jones explains:
The key thing to understand about apple varieties is that apples do not come true from seed ... If you like the apples made by a particular tree, and you want to make more trees just like it, you have to clone it: Snip off a shoot from the original tree, graft it onto a living rootstock, and let it grow.
In 2012, with help from the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), Bunker began developing a gravel pit near the Unity, Maine, fairgrounds into a terraced orchard, whose rootstock could be used to host grafts from heritage apple trees. In 2014, the first trees were planted in what is now called the Maine Heritage Orchard (part of MOFGA). The ten-acre (4.0 ha) publicly accessible orchard includes traditional Maine pear trees as well as apple trees.
Bunker is working to help geneticists create a database of apple DNA by collecting genetic material from new spring leaves of local apple varieties. This project is in collaboration with Cameron Peace at the University of Washington, who also runs an online crowd-sourced DNA-collection website.
Personal life
Bunker lives with his wife Cammy Watts on a 100-acre (40 ha) farm in Palermo, Maine.
References
- "A Year With the Apples of the Arnold Arboretum" (PDF). Arnold Arboretum.
Pomologist and apple explorer John Bunker of Fedco Trees nursery in Maine kindly shared his biogeographic review of significant heirloom varieties in New England.
- "Apple Culture: Sleuths encouraged to hunt for Maine's lost apples". Portland Press Herald.
"I am convinced that most of them are still out there, either behind a barn or in an abandoned orchard or even in a parking lot of a McDonald's where there used to be a farm," said John Bunker, Maine's most prominent apple explorer and historian.
- "Michael Clifford is On a Quest to Preserve and Share the Flavors of New Jersey's Apple Past". Edible Jersey.
John Bunker, a longtime Maine apple explorer, author of Apples and the Art of Detection (2019), and founder of Fedco Trees and the Maine Heritage Orchard
- Tortorello, Michael (October 22, 2014). "An Apple a Day, for 47 Years (Published 2014)". The New York Times – via NYTimes.com.
- "John Bunker's Apple Pie". www.pbs.org. November 22, 2019. Retrieved March 6, 2021.
- "Apple historian John Bunker to give talk April 4". fosters.com.
- ^ Roth, Jeffrey B. (January 25, 2019). "Apple Whisperer John Bunker Explores Maine for Forgotten Heritage Apple Varieties". Lancaster Farming. Retrieved August 19, 2020.
he is a self-taught fruit explorer, who has been interviewed by The New York Times, The Atlantic and numerous national publications about his pioneering work in locating, identifying and preserving heritage apple tree varieties he has found while exploring the fields, farms, woods and towns of Maine seeking living, centuries-old, forgotten and abandoned apple trees.
- Paolella, Vanessa (July 19, 2020). "Graft by graft, John Bunker is preserving Maine's rich apple history".
- ^ "The Maine Heritage Orchard". The Maine Heritage Orchard.
The Maine Heritage Orchard is a ten acre preservation educational orchard...The collection includes varieties from all 16 counties in Maine dating back as far as 1630
- Kummer, Corby (December 2008). "Beyond the McIntosh". Atlantic (magazine). Retrieved July 5, 2023.
he bought part of an old farm in the town of Palermo with two friends and moved onto it within a month of finishing college. He had spent his boyhood in Concord, Massachusetts, imagining a Thoreauvian future for himself (he lived a short hike from Walden Pond); when he went to summer camp on an island in Maine, he knew where that future would be.
- ^ Greenwood, Veronique (July 4, 2023). "In search of the lost apples of New England". Boston Globe. Retrieved July 5, 2023.
The son of a Stanford professor, Bunker visited Maine when he was about 11 years old and decided he would do whatever it took to get back there and make it his home.
- ^ Jacobsen, Rowan (2013). "Why Your Supermarket Sells Only 5 Kinds of Apples". Mother Jones. Retrieved July 5, 2023.
Bunk's love affair with apples dates to 1972, when he began farming a hardscrabble plot of land in the town of Palermo, Maine, after graduating from Colby College. That first fall, he noticed the apples ripening all over town, on trees that had been started decades ago and were now in their prime, that mostly went ignored. He began picking them.
- ^ Jane Lamb (1999). "John Bunker: To Be of Value While I'm Here". MOFGA. Retrieved July 6, 2023.
When he was managing the Belfast Coop Store, a man named Ira Proctor brought in a couple of bushels of Black Oxford apples...This led to learning to graft and soon to collecting scion wood from anonymous trees around the area. The search has continued ever since.
- "New England Apples on New England Apple Day". New England Apples. 2014. Retrieved July 6, 2023.
According to George Stilphen, author of The Apples of Maine (1993), Black Oxford "was found as a seedling by Nathaniel Haskell on the farm of one Valentine, a nail maker and farmer of Paris in Oxford County, about 1790 and the original tree was still standing in 1907, the farm being then owned by John Swett."
- ^ "DNA testing sheds light on the vast, mysterious world of heirloom apples". Portland Press Herald. September 25, 2022. Retrieved July 9, 2023.
Bunker said between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, "Almost every county from here to Georgia had its own special apples that were unique to that area. And certainly every town had its own unique mix of apples people would grow...I like to think apples in Maine should be like cheeses in France, where you go 10 miles and you get a whole new cheese. In Maine there should be a different cider and apple in every town or county."