Apples
Johnny Apple-Seed had the right idea. He was a missionary for the Swedenborgian Church and nurseryman who sold seedling apple trees in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. He had religious objections to grafting and preferred wild apples to all named varieties. Apple seeds do not grow true to type and each apple seed will produce a unique variety of apples. The fruit from Johnny’s trees mostly became alcoholic cider as only some trees would have produced sweet fruit.
You can plant apple seeds. Some people recommend stratification of the seeds in the fridge before planting, but this probably isn’t required if your apple has been cold stored before you ate it and planted the seeds in Spring or Summer. There is an article in the link below which gives a very detailed method of growing apples from seed but I felt that some of the joy is lost. http://www.articlesbase.com/gardening-articles/how-to-grow-apple-trees-from-seed-473689.html
A Life of Apples blog by an apple picker has great information about apples, written in a wonderful style. He has also written about apple genetics, http://appleharvester.blogspot.com/2010/03/apple-genetics.html and has a great photo of some old standard (full size) apple trees here: http://appleharvester.blogspot.com/2010/03/trees-of-yore.html
Golden delicious was a product of nature, a chance seedling. Here is the story of the “discovery” of the Golden Delicious variety from the above blog: “Now one day, when I was about 15 years old, that would have been about 1891, dad sent me out with a big old mowin’ scythe to mow the pasture field. I was swingin’ away with the scythe when I came across a little apple tree that had grown about 20 inches tall. It was just a new little apple tree that had volunteered there. There wasn’t another apple tree right close by anywhere. “I thought to myself, ‘Now young feller, I’ll just leave you there,’ and that’s what I did. I mowed around it and on other occasions I mowed around it again and again, and it grew into a nice lookin’ little apple tree and eventually it was a big tree and bore apples.”
The original Red Delicious tree was a seedling that was cut to a stump for several years before it was tasted. The Red Delicious variety often produces single branch mutations or “sports” and 40 varieties have been patented.
The first ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ tree grew from pips planted by Mary Ann Brailsford when she was a young girl in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, UK in 1809. In 1900 the original tree was knocked over during violent storms; it survived, however, and is still bearing fruit two centuries after it was planted. It is now the most important cooking apple in England and Wales. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bramley_%28apple%29
The Aussie Granny Smith seedling grew in NSW from the remains of some Tasmanian French crab apples which were dumped by the creek: http://www.ryde.nsw.gov.au/ryde/msherwood.htm
Highly recommended is this series of chapters on Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace website. It is the story of a Japanese farmer who is trying to grow apples naturally. They publish a new chapter every week. http://imaginepeace.com/miracleapples/?page_id=8
I have seen many varieties of apple seedlings and grafted apple trees growing in this region naturally with no help from humans.
by Philip Hitchcock, Friends of Stony Creek