Pomology: Preserving apples and creating new varieties by Analyce

Pomology: Preserving apples and creating new varieties by Analyce - February 2025 Scholarship Essay

Since I was seven, the first thing you’d notice in our refrigerator would be the paper towels. Something unconventional for a fridge, but somehow perfectly explainable. Those paper towels, damp and cold, contained apple seeds from store-bought apples as well wild ones from our property. Those seeds, from those paper towels, are now trees on our property. It seems like a simple process, but when creating new varieties, it is especially intricate. This is undoubtedly where I developed a deep interest in science. It’s one big experiment, starting with a seed and speck of pollen, all the way to cross-breeding varieties and grafting multiple breeds onto one tree trunk.

We start with refrigerator-raised sprouting seeds, either from a known species or one from our wild apple trees. Then plant the germinated seeds in sunlit mini-pots. We have a mini-orchard greenhouse in our living room most months of the year. Once the seedlings are strong enough, we find the perfect spot to plant them for ideal maturation. I’ve come to appreciate the fragility of nature and the connection we have to something we create from its beginning. From fencing them for protection to cutting down surrounding trees for sunlight to fertilizing them, these trees are a constant source of my attention.

Eventually the experiment, and necessary research, advanced to another dimension. In the past four years, the seeds in the refrigerator were traded for twigs. Electrical tape and Saran Wrap replace small plastic pots. I learned that the next level of apple cultivating had started, and I was engrossed in this endeavor. I started to watch videos and read blogs to learn all about tree grafting and cross-pollination. Our experimental group now became our control group. We would go out to our bigger trees, and my dad and I would attach small branches of one tree to another, in anticipation that the two would grow symbiotically. In the past two years, the trees we grafted flowered and produced fruit. Seeing that success, we moved on to experimenting with cross-pollination by removing the stamen of flowers of one apple tree and using it to hand-pollinate another. This has led to the salvation of several native varieties, as well as entirely new varieties, including a cross-breed of a Honeycrisp and a Gala my dad insisted on naming the Analyce.

This tinkering-turned-obsession with our newly created orchard has always seemed fairly normal to me; I never realized how special it is. I only started to understand when I saw my friends’ faces as I explained my eccentric pastime. They were mesmerized. When I took a step back and looked at it through that lens, I saw the true beauty in what we had been doing. The idea of human minds creating more efficient methods of production is immensely alluring, and this objective decisively led me to pursue the path of chemical engineering, a profession in which I can design and produce something more complex from something simple through cultivated processes.