Among fresh fruit in the local Hy-Vee Food Store this fall, the many varieties of apples steal the showcases.
Past Plant Exchange articles have addressed the challenges of developing a new kind of apple, such as a favorite Honeycrisp introduced by the University of Minnesota experiment station’s horticulture research center in the early 1990s.
Some crabapples are native to America but not the widely enjoyed apple fruit. However, the apple seed’s ability to produce widely different offspring characteristics and graft a favorite apple tree with a hardy local variety rootstock has enabled the apple tree to be domesticated in a wide variety of climates in this country.
The tasty fruit, adaptable tree, and alcohol from hard cider made the apple a popular fruit tree in the eastern United States in the 1700s and famous for westward expansion in the 1800s.
I haven’t thought about Johnny Appleseed since the Walt Disney cartoon character. But John Chapman, the young apple orchard grower and dreamer, had a plan.
He planted apple seeds in orchards along unsettled stretches of the Ohio River from Western Pennsylvania through Ohio and into Indiana near the entrance to the western frontier in the early 1800s. His source for seeds was cider mills along the river, and pomace filled with seeds were free. A bushel of apple seeds could produce 300,000 trees!
Chapman planned to establish small nurseries near land to be settled and sell small apple trees to homesteaders. Many brought European varieties from Europe that had yet to adapt, like his growing plants. He respected plants and viewed his work like a bumblebee that benefits the plant, the bee, and humans.
No address as an adult, a vegetarian, and a friend of children and Native Americans, Chapman avoided large cities and mostly slept outdoors. One of his outfits was a burlap coffee sack shirt and a tin pot hat. He collected seeds and stored them in moss, and grass covers in a sidecar beside two slashed-together dugout canoes, catamaran style. He died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1845.
More details of Chapman’s life are recounted in The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Pollan pointed out that homesteaders may have been disappointed with seeds they grew from the Chapman’s apples.
The trees would have likely adapted well, but the apples didn’t necessarily have the same taste as Chapman’s apple they tasted. That’s where grafting favorite trees on hardy wood stock enabled apple trees to gain wide popularity nationwide.
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Plant Exchange Blog 
That is how the English (from Persia) walnut was grown in California. It performs very well in the climate, but was not quite as happy with the excellent soil here as the native California black walnut or other native species of walnut were. It was easy to grow native walnuts from their see, and then graft scions of English walnut later.