Several years ago I brought a half-bushel box of Granite Beauty apples to Franklin
County CiderDays in western Massachusetts. My old friend Tom Burford, a 7 th
generation Virginia nurseryman exclaimed with surprise and delight that he’d
never tasted an apple like it before, with its hint of warm spice (think cardamom or
curry powder), resolving into a clear sweet/tart “fruit drops” taste. Another year
the Vermont writer Rowan Jacobsen asked me for some Granite Beauties to
sample and to photograph for his excellent book, Apples of Uncommon Character
(2014). He quoted me in the book’s description as saying that this was “an apple
only I love.” That may have been a slight exaggeration on my part, but I said it in
part because Granite Beauty is today such a rare apple, even in New England, that
hardly anyone has seen or tasted it.
It was not always thus. Granite Beauty was mentioned in mid 19 th -century
agricultural records in New Hampshire, including by Zephaniah Breed, whose
farm in Weare was the home of the original tree. Breed took over this farm, but the
woman credited with actually bringing the apple to Weare was named Dorcas
(Neull) Dow. Tradition says that she pulled up a young seedling apple tree while
visiting Kittery, Maine (actually now in the nearby coastal town of Eliot) and used
it as a riding crop on the journey back to Weare (then known as Halestown). At the
end of her trip, she planted the young tree, and it flourished in its new home,
eventually becoming locally famous.
Zephaniah Breed is credited with introducing, naming, and popularizing
Granite Beauty in 1856, but research I’ve done in an 1888 town history of Weare
indicates that by that time it had been grown in town for around 75 years. Hence
my dating the variety to “before 1815.” And Breed did get the apple to market. In
the late 1800s apples were being shipped to the Boston market via rail from Weare,
and Granite Beauty was listed as one of these “exports.” In fact, Breed claimed that
the apple was so prized that he could sell a bushel of them for a dollar, whereas he
would sell a whole barrel of Baldwins for the same price. Then as now, I suppose,
exclusivity commanded a higher price.
S.A. Beach in The Apples of New York (1905) describes the variety, albeit
very briefly, but after that the apple seems to have fallen off the map, except for the
few people who were still growing it. But, oddly enough, I have known the apple
for most of my life, since I grew up near an old commercial orchard in
Contoocook, NH. By the early 2000s, when I realized that Granite Beauty wasn’t
being propagated or sold in the nursery trade, there were four trees remaining at
Gould Hill Orchards. Erick Leadbeater, the owner, told me that someone from
nearby Weare had brought him the apple, and he’d grown it out (even though he
wasn’t especially fond of it himself).
So that’s the quick and dirty back story of Granite Beauty. From that point
on I became an advocate for this functionally extinct and “unloved” apple, and I
began to tromp around the heirloom block of trees at Gould Hill and take dormant
cuttings (scions) every winter. I also sent the scions off to friends like John Bunker,
for grafting and use in the Maine Heritage Orchard and for sale (as scions for
grafting, if not as grafted trees) through Fedco Trees. My friends and neighbors
have planted my little Granite Beauty trees, in the hopes that it will survive into the
22 nd century and hopefully beyond. I also helped to “board” the apple onto the
Slow Food Ark of Taste, so that it’s now recognized internationally as a unique
New England variety.
All of this is the good news. The bad news is that I’ve had a lot of experience
growing Granite Beauty myself over the past couple of decades, and have begun to
realize why it might not have thrilled nurserymen and growers. Once grafted onto
a dormant rootstock, it often grows weakly, slow and spindly. My hunch is that
“topworking” the scions onto a healthy, mature apple tree is more successful. Then
too, I have been frustrated by the lack of flavor from Granite Beauty apples that
Rich Stadnik and I grew at another orchard. Recently, though, nearly 15 years
after planting, the fruit has finally started to exhibit the beautiful red color and
unique spicy flavor that I associated with the Gould Hill apples so long ago. I
suspect this has something to do with climate (color and flavor tend to improve
with early fall heat and sunshine), but it also may involve the root mass of the
mature tree and the soil nutrients available to the fruit. Tom Burford always
maintained that some apple varieties, like Calville Blanc d’Hiver, don’t reach their
peak flavor until the tree is at least 10 years old. Perhaps Granite Beauty is another
example of that.
The bottom line is, few modern orchardists have much if any experience
growing this variety. So I expect I will continue grafting it and observing how it
grows (or doesn’t) for the rest of my life. And being Exceptionally Rare beats being
Functionally Extinct. I’m talking about the Granite Beauty here. Or, at least I think
I am.