North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Martha L. Davis" <martha_davis@earthlink.net>]

Before you get too excited about minicolumnar apples I think you want to 
double check your impression.  Most of Gene's tress are on M27 and p22.  They 
are very dwarfing rootstocks  they don't really change the growth habit of 
the tree, just the size.  (He wouldn't have the kinds of flavored apples and 
all the antiques that he does if he were only using columnar trees. There are 
just not that many out there.) The Maypole and other columnar apples you see 
in the Stark catalog are columnar mutations that are grafted on the top of 
the tree and will be columnar regardless of what rootstock they are on.  

Another comment when I moved here from Illinois our house had 5 or 6 
different columnar apples, probably all that Stark carried.  I let them all 
fruit and only one seemed worth keeping that one was vaguely Macintosh like.  
When I talked to Gene he concurred that the only columnar apple he thought 
was worth eating worth eating was the original Wijcik AKA Starkspur Compact 
Mac which was a Mac mutation.

Martha