Honey, The Americans Shrank The Apple Trees When Zarrina
Mulloboeva got invited to go apple picking the other day, she
thought it would be a taste of home. She's an exchange student
from Tajikistan, in central Asia — a country close to the
ancestral homeland of apples. Her uncle has a small orchard. In
fact, when Mulloboeva came to the United States six weeks ago,
she brought with her a large bottle of homemade dried apple
slices. But when Mulloboeva arrived at the orchard, she was
startled to find that in America, this land of skyscrapers and
super-sized portions, the apple trees are midgets. Back in
Tajikistan, apples hang on trees that are big as houses, and it
takes real work to get at them. Here, she didn't even need a
ladder. Actually, American apple trees used to be big, too. So
what made them shrink? Very simple: Dwarfing rootstocks. "It all
began a hundred years ago," says Gennaro Fazio, a geneticist
with the USDA's Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New
York. In 1913, Fazio says, a scientist na