A surprising pop of purple! This young apple seedling—grown from local seed—is showing off deep reddish-purple leaves. A beautiful reminder that every apple seed holds a unique genetic story, and nature doesn’t repeat itself.
Genetics at Work in the Orchard
We’ve been noticing something curious in our small, but growing apple orchard: some of our apple trees have regular green leaves, while others have deep purple ones—even though they all came from seeds collected from the same old tree.
So what’s going on?
It turns out that apple trees grown from seed are never exact copies of their parent tree. Apples are like humans—they don’t grow “true to type.” Each seed is the result of cross-pollination, meaning bees carried pollen from other apple varieties nearby. The result? Every seed becomes a completely unique tree.
Some of the young trees inherited more of the parent’s traits—like green leaves. Others took after whatever mystery pollinator helped create the seed. If that “other parent” had purple leaves or red-fleshed fruit in its lineage (like a crabapple or ornamental tree), those traits can show up in the offspring.
Anthocyanins
The purple color comes from natural pigments called anthocyanins, which are influenced by genetics. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong—it just means the tree is wearing its family history on its leaves.
So even though they all came from the same original tree, we’re now seeing the next generation of apple trees expressing a wide variety of traits—some expected, some surprising. Nature’s pretty amazing that way.
We’re excited to see what kind of apples these trees produce as they grow. Who knows—we might even end up with a completely new variety! In any case, this is something we’re going to add to our list of things to learn more about this summer. Anyone out there reading this, who might know more about apple growing than we do, please drop us a note!
