North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

One place I worked for years ago had a bin of tags for an old blackberry variety they no longer grew.  A store with the same name as the old blackberry ordered a large quantity of plants every year and told the nursery to stick the old name on the plants, which they (the store, not the nursery) offered as part of a special promotion every year.

A nursery had an apple tree that bloomed but never set fruit.  They propagated a good quantity of trees from the nonbearing tree and whenever they ran out of a variety, the NB tree was substituted.  Since it never produced fruit, the customer could never prove the tree wasn't what they ordered.

Sometimes it's the nursery, sometimes it's the retailer.

-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003. 
For all other things grape,   http://www.vitisearch.com
A video about The Grape Grower : http://cookingupastory.com/index.php/2008/04/18/the-grape-grower/
On Sep 3, 2008, at 8:50 PM, Donna &/or Kieran wrote:


Sorry Mark, but your theory is backwards to the real situation, as explained 
to me by UT's horticulture expert, David Lockwood.  He says that when the 
nurserys package up their remaining trees and sell them in bulk to the 
package stores, the stores say, "Don't put labels on them, we'll put our own 
labels on them."  Of course, since it's difficult or more like impossible to 
tell one variety from another, they just stick on thousands of labels that 
say "Bartlett pear" or "Granny Smith apple" and years later all the pears 
are Kieffer and all the apples are RD.