BUNK’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH APPLES DATES to 1972, when he began farming a hardscrabble plot of land in the town of Palermo, Maine, after graduating from Colby College. That first fall, he noticed the apples ripening all over town, on trees that had been started decades ago and were now in their prime, that mostly went ignored. He began picking them.

“I felt like these trees I was finding in my town, and then eventually all over Maine and other places, were a gift to me by someone whom I had never met, who had no idea who I was, who had no idea that I was ever going to be.” Over time, he says, “I started thinking, I got to come to Earth and have this amazing experience of all these trees that were grown and bearing, and all these old-timers who would take me out into their fields and show me things and take me on trips down these old roads. And I would knock on somebody’s door, and the next thing you know I’m eating with them. It was like gift after gift after gift. And I started thinking, do I have any responsibilities with this? Or do I just soak it up and let it go?”

John Bunker. Photo by Séan Alonzo Harris

So he founded Fedco Trees, which every year takes a selection of rare heirloom apples and attempts to make them less rare. When he finds one of these missing links, he grafts it onto rootstocks at the Fedco nursery and begins selling the trees a few years later. Bunk estimates that over the past 30 years he has saved anywhere from 80 to 100 varieties from oblivion. His forensic methods involve everything from studying the depth of the cavity around the stem, to checking the trunk for grafting scars, to poring over old nursery catalogs and historical records. He hangs “Wanted” posters at corner stores in the towns where the apples originated, hands them out at historical society meetings. A typical poster reads “Wanted Alive: Narragansett Apple. Last Seen in York County!…Originated on the farm of Jacob H Harmon, Buxton, Me., in 1873.” Then, beneath a drawing and description of the apple, is the plea, “If You Know the Whereabouts of This Apple Please Contact Fedco.” He dreams of finding once-adored apples that haven’t been heard from in a century, like the Fairbanks (the pride of Winthrop, Maine) and the Naked Limbed Greening (a big green sucker from Waldo County). His current Holy Grail is the Blake, a richly flavored yellow apple so tasty it is said to have been exported to England in the 1870s. According to old catalogs and horticulture books, the Blake, with flesh that was “fine, firm, crisp, subacid,” was widely distributed in Maine in the mid-1800s. Blake trees had a distinctive habit of holding onto their apples after most others had dropped theirs. Bunk had been tantalizingly close to a positive Blake ID in December 2011, when an old tree covered with small yellow apples was spotted in a field near Portland, on land that might have been owned by a J.H. Blake in the 1870s, but the tree turned out to be a seedling, the apples didn’t quite fit, and the quest for the Blake continued.

One of Bunk’s best finds was the Fletcher Sweet, which his research indicated had originated in the Lincolnville area. In 2002, he met a group from the Lincolnville Historical Society. They had never heard of the apple, but they knew of a part of Lincolnville called Fletcher Town, which, like many other old villages in northern New England, had since been reclaimed by the forest. A member of the society wrote an article for the local paper saying it was looking for an old apple called a “Fletcher.” A 79-year-old named Clarence Thurlow called the paper and said, “I’ve never heard of a Fletcher, but I know where there’s a Fletcher Sweet.”

The Cox Orange Pippin apple, an excellent dessert apple, meaning one that is to be eaten raw. USDA.

Thurlow led Bunk to the abandoned intersection that had once been the heart of Fletcher Town, pointed to an ancient, gnarled tree, and said, “That’s the tree I used to eat apples from when I was a child.” The tree was almost entirely dead. It had lost all its bark except for a two-inch-wide strip of living tissue that rose up the trunk and led to a single living branch about 18 feet off the ground. There was no fruit, but Bunk was interested. A few months later he returned, took a handful of shoots, and grafted them to rootstock at his farm. A year later, both Thurlow and the tree died, but the grafts thrived, and a few years later, they bore the first juicy, green Fletcher Sweet apples the world had seen in years. “It’s a great apple,” Bunk says. “It has a super-duper distinctive flavor.” Today, Bunk has returned young Fletcher Sweet trees to Lincolnville.

This is the magic of apples. You can’t take a graft of Clarence Thurlow and grow a new one, but his tree was easily duplicated and returned to Maine life. Today, I can take a bite out of a Fletcher Sweet and know exactly what Thurlow was experiencing as a boy 80 years ago. I can chomp into a Newtown Pippin and understand what Thomas Jefferson was lamenting in Paris when he wrote to a friend that “they have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”

“It’s about apples and it’s not about apples,” Bunk says of his work. “I talk about the history of apples, but you know what? I’m giving a highly political talk, because it’s about our agricultural heritage.”