Wild Apples for Climate Repair & Resilience

Help preserve an endangered wild fruit tree that can feed people while storing carbon for climate repair!

People all over the world eat apples. The domesticated apple, "Malus domesticus" is picked, sliced, baked, stored. Unfortunately for people who grow and consume them, apples are mostly grown through grafting/cloning because they don’t reliably produce an edible fruit from seed. They are also vulnerable to disease so commercial production usually relies on industrial fungicides and insecticides, products with high ecological impact.

Researchers found that all of our apples descend from a handful of apples taken thousands of years ago from a few trees of an ancestral species found in Eastern Kazakhstan: "Malus sieversii". This tree is extremely diverse and can be grown from seed to produce edible fruit. They grow over 50-70 feet tall and appear to be resistant to most of the diseases common to domesticated apples.

Apple trees in general are good producers dense wood and have been shown to sequester carbon. The much larger wild trees produce similarly dense wood and so have great potential to serve dual functions– helping the climate while feeding people and providing fuel and materials. 

These trees offer a lot of promise: they can sequester carbon fast, produce diverse fruit, and protect our food security. However, the forests that are home to these ancestral apple trees are dying out. The Wild Apple is in danger from urban encroachment, deforestation, and agriculture.

I've gathered a group of friends and colleagues to grow these apples on the West Coast of the US. We have been gathering samples and grafting new trees. So far, we have started 195 healthy trees from 100 parent trees and with the intention of collecting and grafting more. They are temporarily growing on a farm and we are looking for a more permanent location for them to live and start producing wood, fruits, and new trees.

By growing enough trees together,  we aim to establish and care for a wild apple orchard with a healthy, robust  gene pool that can produce offspring. New orchards can be started with our model and from our trees.

I’m fascinated by the systems that link Culture & Nature & have spent my life studying systems ecology, ecological landscape planning & design, & ways to repair the climate. First from reading Michael Pollen’s The Botany of Desire and then from other research, I started to focus on the history of apples.

The value of this project is finding ways to preserve these trees while making them available for people who want to integrate them into forestry, orchards, yards, and types of land use. 

Grafting these trees has material costs including tools, supplies, and root stock. We are hoping to recover our costs and have the funds to add more trees to the collection.

All funds we raise will go to supporting this project. Any donations past our goal will go to expanding our efforts and moving on next steps.

All donors will receive updates, access to our newsletter as it gets written and posted & access to our project website's donor area once it is built. We are aiming for a quarterly.

All donors over $20 will receive a seed pack once we get fruit (this will be a few years)

The first 100 donations above $50 will be able to link a person's name to a tree. I will keep the names on record as associated with a particular tree and, when they are big enough, we can put a plaque on the tree. Raising trees is an unpredictable business, I'll do my best to take care of them but your tree may not survive.

All donors over $50 will be invited to a dinner at the orchard once it's planted.