...apples don't "come true" from seeds - that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling bearing little resemblance to its parent. Anyone who wahts edible apples plants grafted trees, for the fruit of seedling apples is almost always inedible - "sour enough"
Looked at from this angle, planting seeds instead of clones was an extraordinary act of faith in the American land, a vote in favor of the new and unpredictable as against the familiar and European.
"Every wild apple shrub excites our expectations thus," Thoreau wrote, "somewhat
as every wild child. It is , perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man!...Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men."
...The botany of the apple - the fact that the one thing it won't do is
come true from seed - meant that its history would be a history of heroic individuals, rather than groups or types or lines. There is or at least there was, a single Golden Delicious tree, of which every subsequent tree bering that name has been a grafted clone.
REALLY ? --from The Desire of Botany
&
Johnny Appleseed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed
