Stone

type: Dessert

synonyms: Sometimes listed as Stone Pippin. However the Gogar Pippin is also known as Stone Pippin, as is the Birmingham Pippin and Norfolk Stone Pippin , neither are related to this apple.

summary: A regional variety in the northeastern U.S.A. held reign as the most widely-grown apple in the state of New York. It was considered an excellent dessert apple but it has likely been lost.

identification: Medium tending to large. Round to round-flattened. The base colour is bright green, sometimes blushed very pale orange on the sun exposed face. The skin is thick and tough, high polish. Marked with abundant lenticels. The stem is short and slender, set in a medium deep, narrow cavity which is usually russeted. The calyx is small, partly or fully open and set in a shallow, funnel-shaped basin which is sometimes corrugated. A bluish bloom develops on the skin as the apple matures.

characteristics: Described by S.A. Beach as having white flesh, sometimes slightly yellowish. Coarse-grained, tender. Somewhat juicy and sweet-tart and aromatic.

origins: The Stone Stone and Bethel Bethel apples likely share a common ancestry in that both are likely descended from the seedlings of an open-pollinated Blue Pearmain. The pips were collected by David Stone during the late 1700s from among the fallen apples around a Blue Pearmain tree and were subsequently planted on Stone's property in Bethel (Vermont). (Please see Bethel ). The fruit from these pips grew well and were well received by apple growers throughout the region. In the 1830s Phillip Stone in Potsdam, New York, received a quantity of seeds from his relatives in Bethel, Vermont, about 300 kilometres distant. Though distinctly similiar to the Bethel apples, the Stone apples were not identical. According to S.A. Beach in Volume One of "The Apples of New York" (published 1905), "This variety was brought from Bethel, Vermont into Potsdam, St. Lawrence County, about 1836 or 1837 by a Mr. (Phillip) Stone. He propagated it in that locality and it came to be known locally as the Stone apple... During the last sixty years it has been grown in some sections of St. Lawrence county more extensively than any other variety." Beach continued by comparing the varieties. "Some have supposed that Stone is identical with Bethel but as received from various parts of Northern New York it is certainly distinct. The fruit (of the Stone) averages larger than that of Bethel, sometimes becoming very large, and its form is more elongated and more inclined to roundish ovate. Its color is duller than that of Bethel, being not quite so dark red in tone, and it is noticeably less striped and splashed. The dots of Stone are considerably the larger, more irregular and more noticeably areolar. The dots of Bethel are the brighter ; its stem usually shorter and more slender ; its cavity decidedly smaller and narrower; its basin slightly narrower and more regular; its core less abaxile and slightly smaller, and its cells less uniformly developed."

cultivation: Vigorous, Very hardy. Needs to be thinned at fruit set to maintain size since it tends to over-produce.

progeny: Oel Austin