Their center of diversity of the genus Malus is the east Turkey, southwest Russia region of Asia.
Although a few Malus species are native to North America, they ere never domesticated as a food crop on this continent.
Apple were probably improved through selections over a period of thousands of year by early farmers.
Domestication efforts were no doubt frustrating because planting apple seeds from good quality fruit generally does not produce new trees with even remotely similar fruit.
This stems from apples being a cross –pollinated and highly heterozygous species.
Also, they do not root from cuttings the way grapes and olive would and their complete domestication was not possible until grafting was invented , sometime is the first millennium BC.
Once this accomplished, Greek and Romans selected superior types and spread them throughout Europe.
Alexander the Great is credited with finding dwarfed apples in Asia Minor in 300 BC, those he brought back to Greece may well have been the progenitors of dwarfing rootstock.
The excellent keeping qualities of apples were discovered by at least 100 BC, as the Roman Varro provided written accounts of “fruit houses” for storing apples for winter.
Throughout medieval times, several authors detailed fertility, water, site preferences and pruning of apple trees.
Apples came to North America with the colonists in the 1600s, and the first apple orchard on this continent is said to have been located near Boston in 1625.
From New England origins, apples, moved west with pioneers. John Chapman (alias Johnny Appleseed) and missionaries during the 1700s, and 1800s.
In 1900s, irrigation projects in Washington State began and allowed the development of the multibillion dollar fruit industry, of which the apple is the leading species.
Today, apple production is growing most rapidly in California and remaining steady or declining in the eastern states due to overproduction and greater disease and insect pressures.
Malus Domestica (apple): History of Cultivation
