What could be more American than apple pie? Well, maybe crab apple pie, since those sour wild apples were the only kind growing here when the Pilgrims showed up in 1620. The sweet, domesticated version, Malus domestica, was but halfway through its march around the world then, having started in the prehistoric forests of central Asia, thence along human trade routes westward till finally making it to the British Isles, thanks to the Romans. Some 70 varieties grew there, the fruit venerated for its deliciousness, nutritiousness, and versatility, both in cooking and as the source for the much-consumed hard cider. The Pilgrim helped it make its leap across the Atlantic, almost certainly packing seeds and grafted seedlings aboard the Mayflower.

The grafted plants were clones of trees that did well in the old country, but conditions were different enough on the coast of Massachusetts Bay that many didn’t survive. Happily, apple trees have a peculiar way of reproducing: every apple contains traits from both parents so they can differ, sometimes dramatically, from their parent trees. Somewhere in those imported seeds were ones yielding trees that flourished in their new home. Those trees wouldn’t produce fruit for five to ten years, but once they did, America was ready for its first apple pie.

North America’s first real apple orchard was on the slopes of not-yet-Boston’s Beacon Hill, where the eccentric Reverend William Blaxton settled, alone, in 1625.  When the Puritans bought some of his land and moved in, he is said to have ridden his trained bull through the streets of the fledgling community, handing out apples and flowers to his new neighbors.

Amelia Simmons was a big apple fan. In 1796 she wrote the nation’s first cookbook, American Cookery, in which she opined:

Apples…are highly useful in families, and ought to be universally cultivated, excepting in the compactest cities. There is not a single family but might set a tree in some otherwise useless spot, which might serve the twofold use of shade and fruit; on which 12 or 14 kinds of fruit trees might easily be engrafted, and essentially preserve the orchard from the intrusions of boys, &c. which is too common in America.

Intrusive American boys notwithstanding, apple trees spread out across the new country, thriving, some thought, better than they did in Europe, and providing food and drink for their owners. Hard cider was safer to drink than water, and easy to make. Estimates vary, but the average colonial adult drank a lot of it—up to a gallon a day. By 1810, Vermont had 125 distilleries making 173,000 gallons of apple brandy annually.

The brandy kept the chill off the drinker, but apple trees themselves require cold weather to break their dormancy and promote growth, so New England’s climate was (and is) ideal. The best places to plant were (and are) sunny hillsides with good “air drainage,” which allows cold air to flow downhill unimpeded in spring, protecting the new blossoms from frost.  Best of all are the conditions that modern-day Champlain Orchards enjoys on the slopes above Lake Champlain in Shoreham, Vermont. Bill Suhr, co-owner and orchardist, explains that the ice stays late, postponing spring in the orchards until the threat of frost is mostly past. In the fall, the lake acts like a heat sink, prolonging fall and allowing the apples to ripen longer towards a later harvest.

Suhr points out that a little subzero snap in the fall is no bad thing—sugars in the apple develop further, deepening taste and sweetness. “A lot of our pick-your-own customers wait until after the first frost to show up,” he says. They may not know it, but they’re following in the footsteps of a great apple connoisseur, Henry David Thoreau. In his beautiful essay “Wild Apples,” he concentrates on the virtues of the fruit he found during his backwoods rambles, but he cites a phenomenon common to all apples: “Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.” “All apples are good in this state,” he writes, “and your jaws are the cider-press.”

Thoreau wouldn’t recognize Suhr’s orchard, nor do many of today’s passersby. “They think we’re a vineyard,” he says, describing the latest method of apple-tree horticulture. Known as tall spindle planting and pioneered at Cornell University, it involves planting upwards of 1500 dwarf trees per acre (old-school orchards with full-size trees have about 50), supporting them on trellises in rows 12 feet apart, pruning any limbs “thicker than your finger,” keeping the trees shorter for easy picking—and watching the fruit thrive. “Each apple sits on its own one-foot branch in full sunlight,” says Suhr, “The yield is immense.”

A couple of hours away, Liberty Orchard in Brookfield, Vermont, is a classic pick-your-own place run by Ginny and Dwayne Brees, but it’s no mom-and-pop affair. Even with their agricultural backgrounds (Dwayne has a degree from University of Missouri), “it’s been more work than we realized,” says Ginny. They grow disease-resistant varieties like Liberty, Freedom, and Jonafree on 720 small trees planted across three acres. Late winter means pruning every one of them and removing all the resulting debris. Early spring brings spraying with ant-mite oil and fertilizing. If it looks to be a strong year for blossoms, they’ll spray with a substance meant to stress the trees towards a partial blossom drop—each blossom can produce six apples, too many for a healthy crop. When about ten percent of the blossom are open, and hopefully before the dandelions bloom, and preferably when the weather is sunny and dry, they’ll call in a local beekeeper, who brings two or three hives in for a week or so to pollinate. “When it comes to flowers, the bees aren’t too discriminating,” says Ginny. “We don’t want the dandelions competing for their attention.”

And that’s all before the tourists show up on the far side of summer—which is, of course, what all the hard work was for. “Even people who arrive with the kids all crabby leave crunching apples and taking pictures,” says Ginny. What could be more American?