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Apples: The Family Tree
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11525 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
2,358 Words |
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Elaine Brooks and Cornelia (Connie) Campbell
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The sixteenth-century gentleman farmer and would-be author to whom Gerard referred would feel right at home with Jan and John McEwan, a twentieth-century lady and gentleman well-qualified to write their own "peculiar volume of Apples." They would very likely be discussing many of the same apples.
Jan and Jack McEwan operate Rose Farm in Lyndeborough, in historic Hillsboro County, New Hampshire. They and their family have been living on and developing the farm and its apple orchards for the past twelve years. As their orchards have grown, so have the number and variety of apples they produce, including many long-forgotten (at least in these United States) apple species that trace their roots to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even back to John Gerard's time. The McEwans' own knowledge of the amazing fruit that nourishes their lives and livelihood has grown, too, along with that of the hundreds of families that visit Rose Farm every year at this time to pick their own apples and share a traditional family harvest that calls on centuries of custom, companionship, and plain good eating.
A visit to Rose Farm is like an excursion through time. Imagine what it's like at this time of year…apple harvest time…when the New England fall foliage paints the New Hampshire hills in golds and red, and the very thought of apples and cinnamon baking in your kitchen sends a favorite, familiar aroma through your house and into your imagination.
A twenty-minute drive west from Nashua, in New Hampshire's booming Golden Triangle, and you start to climb into the foothills of the Appalachians and back to the villages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England. The hillsides are so densely planted with orchards that the blossoms of May cover the hillsides as heavily as the blizzards of February. This is, after all, one of the major apple-producing regions of the country.
In less than half an hour, you reach Rose Farm. The 150-year-old white clapboard farmhouse and big red barn belong to a way of life that has been threatened by technology and the fickleness of the economy. But Rose Farm and the McEwans appear today to be as strongly rooted and tenacious as the orchards which thrive around them. You see immediately that a life of New England farming has created the kind of character and fortitude which is as solid as the granite foundations of the hills they farm.
To reach these hills, the McEwans traveled quite literally around the world. John McEwan is a Pan American Airways captain who has spent much of his career flying transatlantic and Far Eastern routes. Today, he flied the Pan Am Airbus from New York to the Caribbean and Mexico. To leave harsh New England weather for warm resorts south of the border is the dream of many a Yankee. To Jack McEwan, it simply means he can be at home every three days. A transoceanic schedule would keep him away for two weeks at a stretch. Two weeks is long time for a farmer to leaves his crops.
In the early seventies, the McEwans were living in Munich, West Germany, when they first contemplated a permanent homestead. Their son Jonathon was in elementary school, and although Germany was a fine place to live and Hong Kong had been exciting, New England had been in their thoughts for a long time. Their instructions to the real estate agents were for "a house and barn and at least fifty
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