This group wants to preserve Colorado's core values.
in 2017 with a small bag of apples from an unkempt old apple tree that sat in the middle of a field near her home in Louisville. Suding, an ecology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who moved here from Berkeley about ten years ago, would often walk along the bike path that weaves through the field, appreciating the view of the Boulder Flatirons to the northwest. She had seen the tree before, but never thought much about it.
Since apple trees along the Front Range typically live between 80 and 120 years, her interest in the old trees took on some urgency. That fall, she founded the Boulder Apple Tree Project, an initiative based in CU's ecology department that's designed to track down and preserve the trees before they die.As the Boulder Apple Tree Project got underway,
It turned out that most of the trees the project was identifying were among the first ever planted in the area. By the late 1800s, Boulder was an all-out apple town and Colorado a major apple-producing state."Chautauqua was an orchard before [it was] Chautauqua, so there's old trees there that are really quite special," Suding says. The nearby towns of Hygiene and Lyons both had major orchard operations; a stretch of road near U.S. 36 going up toward Estes Park is even named"Apple Valley Road.
Development was the last nail in the coffin, replacing the orchards of north Boulder with housing."A lot of times they would cut down most of the trees, but they would leave one or two in the backyards when they were making their subdivisions and the developments in the ’40s and ’50s," she explains."So there's a lot of interesting old trees in that area.
"The trees from Kazakhstan started being collected and transferred along the Silk Road thousands of years ago, and then they started hybridizing with crab apples from Europe," Suding says. "Then people started taking them to their different areas in Europe and cultivating them." That explains the Johnny Appleseed story."One of the reasons there was a lot of spreading apple seeds throughout the Ohio Valley was basically to find the one in a million tree that was good," she explains."There's a lot of bad apples.""Immigrants from, let's say, Northern Europe had favorite trees. That was how they made their applesauce or their cider or something like that.
The University of Minnesota has been breeding and researching apples since the late 1800s. But while the Boulder Apple Tree Project has found genetic matches for clones of this tree, it has not been able to find a specific match in those files or among any of the named or known apple tree cultivars in a database kept by the United States Department of Agriculture."Maybe it was never named," speculates Dunbar-Wallis."It could have been named, but we haven't found a name for it.
"We connect with historians and local historical societies, and they're able to tell us about the families and where those families came from," says Dunbar-Wallis. So in 2018, the Boulder Apple Tree Project started what it called the"Apple Blitz." The blitz takes place every fall and involves researchers and community volunteers going out to hunt for more lost apple trees."We send all these teams out to record and try to tag and do as much as we can to document all these trees," Suding explains.
Before the researchers left, they nailed a small silver plaque to the trunk:"Boulder Apple Tree Project // 513." The project also works with other colleges and community colleges throughout the state, including Front Range Community College and Fort Lewis College. "I think it's a really cool project," says Mary Tiernan, an arborist for Boulder County Parks & Open Space."We've been acting as facilitators to get them access to trees that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to access. They're really awesome people to work with...full of cool little tidbits about the trees."
Now, despite some minor issues with insects and weeds and one more major incident involving deer breaking in and eating the tops of some specimens , the trees are in great shape."I would say the trees have doubled in size since May 1," Dunbar-Wallis reports. "This can be kind of like a laboratory, as well as a place that people can walk in and look for themselves," Suding says.
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