Thursday, October 23, 2014

Maiden Blush

Google "Maiden Blush" and you get some hits, but not what I'm looking for--an apple. I'm inspired by this article in the NYTimes on an obsessive who's documented 17,000 varieties of apple, few of which are commercially grown today.  He's going to have a book out shortly, a book which started as a file under MS-DOS and for which he's still using WordPerfect 7.  I tip my hat to him, at least I would if JFK hadn't eliminated hats.

There were a few old apple trees on the farm where I grew up.  I only know two names: Yellow Transparent and Maiden Blush.  The Transparent was a good cooking/sauce apple, early maturing and close to the house, so we made fair use of it.  The tree was easy to climb, though the best apples were always beyond one's reach.  The Maiden Blush was in the "orchard" proper, the group of four or five tree slowly mouldering away.  The trees themselves weren't productive, so I visited them only a couple times a summer, occasionally tasting the odd apple.  Presumably my family knew the names of the other trees, but if I ever knew them I've long forgotten.  "Maiden Blush" sticks in my mind.

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