Rooted in conservation

One of Mark Richardson's proudest achievements is the restoration of an heirloom apple orchard. The University of Delaware College of Agriculture and Natural Resources alumnus devoted years to the restoration project.

"The collection was started in the 1930s by Stearns Lothrop Davenport, a trustee of the Worcester County Horticultural Society," Richardson said of the orchard. "He worked with faculty at the University of Massachusetts to identify the most important apple varieties for conservation purposes. Davenport's life mission was to collect around 100 of the most important apples in New England."

Today, the Frank L. Harrington Orchard collection includes 119 heirloom apples represented by approximately 268 trees. The orchard is located at the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, where Richardson previously served as director of strategic horticulture partnerships and executive director for both Botanic Gardens Conservation International U.S. and the Ecological Landscape Alliance.

"When I first started in 2018, the trees were in decline," Richardson said. "They were riddled with a bacterial disease called fire blight. They were pretty old, they'd been planted in the early 1930s, and apples of that type have a life expectancy of about 30 to 40 years before they need to be reset."

Richardson worked with John Bunker, whom he describes as a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, to collect propagation material from each tree in the collection. The material was grafted onto new rootstock and replanted in the orchard.

Apple seeds don't come true to seed. This means if you grow an apple tree from a seed, the fruit won't be the same variety as the tree the seed came from. For this reason, living collections are the primary means of preserving genetic material. The garden collaborated with the Apple Genome Project to conduct DNA tests on the heirloom trees and discovered several rare varieties.

"For some varieties, the orchard has what is considered the reference panel," Richardson said. "Meaning the variety has not been analyzed before, and our tree is now the reference for that variety."