A Heritage Rich in Variety

Apple tree in Port Coquitlam

Look around you now. Many of the buildings and grounds you may see are recent additions to our landscape but sometimes pieces of the past are preserved and allowed to live on, altered in many cases or, like the apple tree in the photo above, surrounded by a landscape that bears little resemblance to the orchard it was just one productive member of. 

Such is the price of progress and there are still plenty of apples around, right? Well, yes and no. We like to think we have far more choice in the world of today but even apples are standardized so there are far fewer varieties sold today than were available in the past. 

Researching heritage apples was part of the work I did for my internship at Bowen Island Heritage. The society has a natural affinity to apple lore since they are situated in some of the cottages in Davies Heritage Orchard in Snug Cove on Bowen Island. When I worked for them, they were not only trying to preserve the cottages but the orchard as well, painstakingly introducing more heritage apple varieties.

When you think about it, the amount of apple varieties makes sense. Farmers were much more isolated then and many different types of apples would be tied to small regional areas. Those areas would not be content to have just one type of apple. There needed to be apples that came early in the season and those that came late, ones that would store well over the winter in the cold cellar, ones that could be preserved by drying and ones ready to be eaten just picked from the tree.

 I learned more about apples during my time with Bowen Heritage and my research was turned into a booklet about apples by the class that came after mine. It was good to see my research come to life. Not only that, but the apple saga made me think about the realities of life when small communities were more isolated, households needed to be more self-sufficient and life was full of rich variety. 

* I was pleased to see that some of the projects I worked on are still on the Bowen Heritage website. Under the tab "Projects" - "Heritage Stories" quite a few of them are ones that I wrote up. A Surprisingly Volatile History was a side of Bowen Island that I hadn't known about.