The Apple is a conspicuous plum; its shape, color, size, flavor; its
firm, blood-red flesh and long-keeping quality, all distinguish it. Even
the tree is marked with its robust growth, flat-topped head, peculiar,
light brown bark, handsome foliage and wood that can be propagated from
cuttings with surprising ease. It is difficult to predict the future
of this interesting plum, but probably it will remain for most part a
curiosity. Its peculiar flavor is not pleasant at first taste and it is
doubtful if many will learn to like it. Unpalatability is the defect of
the variety which will most often be counted against it. In general the
Apple is inferior for dessert or kitchen to the Satsuma, itself none
too good, which it most nearly resembles of all plums. In the Station
collection tree and fruit are quite susceptible to both fungus and insect
pests and the fruits ripen unevenly. The fruit of the variety keeps and
ships remarkably well and these qualities may be its saving grace, both
so well developed as to make it valuable for breeding purposes when these
characters are desired.
In his catalog for 1898 Burbank announces the Apple as a new plum and
says, “Among the welcome surprises found three years ago among a lot of
some twenty-five thousand plum seedlings was this one, bearing a cruel
load of enormous plums when only two years old.... It was at once named
Apple from the very close resemblance in form, color general appearance,
and rare keeping qualities.... Its parentage is not known, except that
it is a second generation seedling from cross-bred seedlings, and no
doubt Satsuma and probably Robinson are in its line of ancestry.” Satsuma
characters are readily detected in tree and fruit and especially its
hard, red flesh, but in no way is its descent from Robinson apparent.
Tree of medium size, flat-topped, spreading, dense-topped,
slow-growing, semi-hardy, productive; branches rough and
thorny, with numerous fruit-spurs, dark ash-gray, reddish and
with numerous lenticels; branchlets often with a rosette of
flower-buds on the apex of the shoots, slender, with short
internodes, greenish-red changing to dark brown, glossy,
glabrous, with numerous, conspicuous, large, raised lenticels;
leaf-buds small, short, obtuse, plump, appressed.
Leaves folded upward, obovate or oblanceolate, one and
one-quarter inches wide, three and three-quarters inches
long, thin, leathery; upper surface purplish-red late in the
season, glossy, glabrous, with grooved midrib; lower surface
light green, pubescent at the base of the veins; apex acutely
pointed, base cuneate, margin finely and doubly crenate and
with small amber glands; petiole five-eighths inch long,
pubescent, red along one side, with from three to ten large,
conspicuous, reniform, red or yellowish glands on the stalk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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