"Rediscovering the forgotten apple trees of the Manzano Mountains"
"Over the past century, the biodiversity of apple trees has declined sharply in the United States. Monoculture orchards have erased the mature forested orchards that once served as habitat for dozens of bird species such as bluebirds, northern flickers, and scarlet tanagers. There once were some 16,000 named apple varieties in the US alone. We’ve now lost more than half of those varieties, with only 3,000 remaining. As a naturalist, I have been researching apple biodiversity for several years, and I find it especially gratifying when this pathway leads me to our rich, and sometimes forgotten, history of apple growing.
To rediscover some of that history, I looked to one of the earliest known places where apples were grown in North America—the Manzano Mountains. But for two weeks, I had been hearing “There are no apple trees left” and “I don’t know of any.” I’d spoken to half a dozen rangers at Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument and Manzano Mountains State Park. Despite their shrugs, my family and I drove a couple of hours south to Mountainair, New Mexico, to see for ourselves. In my heart, I couldn’t believe there were no historic apple trees in the monument's ruins, located in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains. After all, the mountains and the village at their base are named after the Spanish word for apple tree.
My husband and I had pored over a bevy of old maps and determined that a 1794 map by French cartographer Jean-Baptiste D’Anville seemed to have been the first to refer to the Sierra Moreno as the Mansos Mountains. At the time, the mountains may have been named for the Manso indigenous peoples. A later map by the American cartographer Samuel Mitchell refers to the mountains as Manzanas, and a map prepared the same year, in 1867, by the US Topographical Bureau officially christens the range as the Manzana Mountains. A paper published in New Mexico Geology in 2000 notes that the apple trees in the Salinas area are probably the oldest living apple trees in the country, with their history stretching back to early Spanish explorers and the native Tompiro and Tiwa peoples who planted the trees for 17th-century Franciscan friars."
Priyanka Kumar reports for Sierra magazine January 22, 2025.
SEE ALSO:
"The Real Johnny Appleseed Brought Apples — and Booze — to the American Frontier" (Smithsonian)
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