Timeline of United States discoveries
The Red Delicious is a clone of apple cultigen, now comprising more than 50 cultivars. The Red Delicious apple was discovered in 1875 by Jesse Hiatt on his farm in Peru, Iowa. Believing that the seedling was nothing more than nuisance. After chopping down the tree three times, Hiatt decided to let the tree grow and eventually, it produced an unknown and new harvest of red apples. Hiatt would eventually sell the rights to this type of apple to the Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards who renamed it the Red Delicious.
Greytown, New Zealand
The Kidds came to Greytown in 1906 from Wanganui where they had been engaged in fruit growing. In 1910 they bought a twenty-acre farm let in Udy Street which he planted with a mixture of soft fruits (blackcurrants & gooseberries) and apple trees. They made the improvement to the orchard, their main purpose in life, continually experimenting with propagating new varieties of apples. Their experiments with cross pollination resulted in the fixing of several commercial varieties, the most notable of which are the Kidd’s Orange Red, Freyburg and Gala which is grown worldwide.