Latter-Day Johnny Appleseed Rescues Varieties on Brink of Extinction

Carlos Manning is silent but smiling as he peels the pale yellow skin from an apple and slices off a bite of its butter-colored flesh.

“Not many people have ever tasted this one,” he says, balancing the first slice on his paring knife.

Manning has eaten thousands of apples and grown thousands more in his lifetime, but this is special-- his first taste of an “old-timey” Butter variety rediscovered last summer in Greenbrier County.

He takes a few seconds to contemplate its flavor and feel-- sweet, firm, slightly spicy--then announces a verdict: “It’s excellent. To me, it’s top quality.”

Seven years ago, trying to recapture tastes of his childhood, Manning became an explorer in the world of fruit.

He knew coal, as an equipment operator at a processing plant in southern West Virginia. But he knew nothing about apples--except what he liked. And he couldn’t find it in a store. To him, the picture-perfect Red Delicious tastes like sawdust.

“A lot of people have never tasted anything like this,” he says, gesturing at the dozen apples on his kitchen table.

So odd-looking, these are among some 300 varieties that Manning has helped rescue from near extinction. Forgotten species that once flourished in small family and large commercial orchards, they now grow on his 240-acre farm.

Their names mystify the supermarket shopper: Wolf River, Red Winter Pearmain, Lowland Raspberry, Western Beauty, Esopus Spitzenburg, Grimes Golden, Shenango Strawberry, Maiden Blush.

They are not photogenic: misshapen, oddly colored, unusually small. But their flavors are so intense that even a person who lacks the passion for fruit can be converted.

“When there was no work in West Virginia, people would take off, leave for the big cities. They would never come back here to live,” Manning says, “but they would remember what things tasted like.”

These days, those same people send letters with memories of an apple: its taste and appearance, when it was picked--but no name. Sometimes they send an apple or a cutting from the tree. Other times, it’s just a note with directions to an orchard.

That’s how Manning found the Butter.

The tree in Greenbrier County was in bad shape but healthy enough to take a few cuttings, graft them onto rootstock and grow a new one. Manning even went back to pick an apple so he knows how it should taste. “I do everything I can to make sure it’s right,” he says.

Manning found the Pittman and the Mann flourishing in other states. He found the Warsaw, the Egyptian and the Rainbow growing in West Virginia.

The Rainbow, according to a page in the 3-inch-thick three-ring binder on his mantel, had been considered extinct. “The way I look at it, it’s not extinct. It’s lost,” he says. “It just takes somebody to go find it.”

Manning is not alone in his search. He is a student of perhaps the world’s leading expert, Tom Burford.

Until a few years ago, Burford and his brother, Russell, ran an orchard in Monroe, Va., with some 500 varieties. He still holds an autumn apple tasting each year at Monticello.

Manning sought out Burford in 1992, when he discovered the Western Beauty, an apple that books had listed as extinct. He grafted one and gave it to Burford, sealing a friendship that continues today.

Burford, now retired, consults regularly as Manning, 51, continues his work.

Everything Manning knows about apples and apple trees came from Burford and books. He keeps detailed records of every tree he sells or gives away. “If my tree would die, there are others out there to get it back,” he says.

“Blacktop is taking a lot of fruit trees now,” he says. “Trees are just being pushed out. They’re gone. . . .

“Just knowing you’ve preserved something makes you feel good.”

Initially, Manning just wanted to restore the trees on the farms where he and his wife, Mavis, grew up. But he got carried away. He now runs a fledgling mail-order business that, in a good year, comes close to breaking even.

He gets his cuttings from an orchard stretching six acres; a single 8-foot tree can yield as many as 30 sections for grafting.

In a plot across the road, surrounded by an electrified fence to fend off hungry deer, are waist-high saplings called “whips” that sell for about $15 apiece. Manning sells larger trees, too, at prices low enough to encourage widespread planting.

Without fruit, though, all the trees look the same--even to an expert. So Manning has mapped their locations and attached yellow tags to the branches.

Among them is the Grimes Golden, parent of the Golden Delicious. A monument to the West Virginia original sits on state Route 27 in the Northern Panhandle.

One tree that needs no tag is the Wolf River, more than 80 years old and half-dead. One of Manning’s cats had a litter inside its hollow base.

A strong windstorm could topple it, so Manning takes as many cuttings as possible from the small portion that remains green. “These apples are worth waiting for,” he says.

Some say the old “heirloom” varieties died out for good reasons. Natural defects made them more vulnerable to disease and less attractive to consumers.

Manning’s apples don’t keep as long or look as pretty as those in the stores. A Red Delicious will last six weeks, an Esopus Spitzenburg perhaps four. Each apple, however, has its own character, and Manning could never pick just one.

Which is your favorite, he is asked.

“The last one.”