The Songs of Ancient Trees

Rediscovering the forgotten apple trees of the Manzano Mountains

By Priyanka Kumar

January 22, 2025

Not yet ripe apples dangling from an apple tree in the Manzanos Mountains

Apples growing wild in the Manzano Mountains. | Priyanka Kumar

Over the past century, the biodiversity of apple trees has declined sharply in the United States. Monoculture orchards have erased the mature forested orchards that once served as habitat for dozens of bird species such as bluebirds, northern flickers, and scarlet tanagers. There once were some 16,000 named apple varieties in the US alone. We’ve now lost more than half of those varieties, with only 3,000 remaining. As a naturalist, I have been researching apple biodiversity for several years, and I find it especially gratifying when this pathway leads me to our rich, and sometimes forgotten, history of apple growing.

To rediscover some of that history, I looked to one of the earliest known places where apples were grown in North America—the Manzano Mountains. But for two weeks, I had been hearing “There are no apple trees left” and “I don’t know of any.” I’d spoken to half a dozen rangers at Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument and Manzano Mountains State Park. Despite their shrugs, my family and I drove a couple of hours south to Mountainair, New Mexico, to see for ourselves. In my heart, I couldn’t believe there were no historic apple trees in the monument's ruins, located in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains. After all, the mountains and the village at their base are named after the Spanish word for apple tree.

My husband and I had pored over a bevy of old maps and determined that a 1794 map by French cartographer Jean-Baptiste D’Anville seemed to have been the first to refer to the Sierra Moreno as the Mansos Mountains. At the time, the mountains may have been named for the Manso indigenous peoples. A later map by the American cartographer Samuel Mitchell refers to the mountains as Manzanas, and a map prepared the same year, in 1867, by the US Topographical Bureau officially christens the range as the Manzana Mountains. A paper published in New Mexico Geology in 2000 notes that the apple trees in the Salinas area are probably the oldest living apple trees in the country, with their history stretching back to early Spanish explorers and the native Tompiro and Tiwa peoples who planted the trees for 17th-century Franciscan friars.

At the end of a morning spent exploring the Quarai ruins at Salinas, I spotted a row of four or five trees in the distance. “Are those apple trees?” I asked my husband. He briskly returned to the car to get our binoculars, and then we took turns looking closely at the line of trees—at the top of one hung a handful of fruit that looked to be apples. I felt a sting of excitement; to be sure, we would need to get closer.

Our two kids were climbing a cottonwood nearby and asked if they might watch from their sturdy perch while both of us hiked to the fruit trees. I normally wouldn’t consider such a request, but intoxicated by the zing of discovery, so close at hand—the trees looked to be five minutes away—I agreed.

“We’ll be back soon—stay right here,” I said, hopping onto a trail smothered on either side with vegetation. But the trail didn’t get us closer to the fruit trees. They might well have been a chimera. Still, in my mind’s eye, I saw enticing apple-like fruit hanging from high branches. Searching harder, we got off the trail and promptly got turned around in the thick vegetation. On instinct, my husband turned to our left, and a few hundred yards away, we stumbled upon a line of four apple trees.

The fruit-bearing tree was closest to me, and a wood pewee was perched on a high dead branch. A slender charcoal-gray bird, he appeared to be resting but flew up a couple of times to fly-catch. A yellow warbler flitted about the branches from which hung the yellow apples with a red blush. 

A delicious sense of excitement bubbled up and mingled with the bright apples and flighty birds. Most fruit trees are non-natives, but they foster connections between us and nature while providing habitat for wildlife. One study named 31 species of birds that use the fruit, seeds, buds, and flowers of apple trees. These birds include my long-standing friends: hairy and downy woodpeckers, kingbirds, bluebirds, cedar waxwings, tufted titmice, hummingbirds, towhees, and evening grosbeaks. The study’s authors noted that the apple tree is a preferred nest site of many species, such as the robin, great crested flycatcher, and red-eyed vireo.

We could smell the apples. Orange globemallow flowers and prickly-pear cacti stood out against the undergrowth, mostly kochia (burning bush), and blue grama grass. Deer, elk, and bears clearly knew about these trees since no visible windblown apples lay on the ground. We lingered among the towering trees, fueled by questions. How old were the trees? Was this quartet planted intentionally, or were they volunteers? The Franciscans had planted fruit trees in the Mission Gardens—a short hike away, behind the ruins of the Quarai Church—and hired Indigenous peoples to tend to them. Unfortunately, those gardens were nothing but a grassy mound now.

Moving about in the grass, I wondered if I stood at the site of one of the old fields. Looking up, I realized that the apple tree next to the fruit-bearer seemed dead. The Puebloans abandoned the Quarai site in the late 1600s, so these ancient trees could have been volunteers, planted by bears who had gorged their fill of apples in the abandoned Mission Gardens. Miraculously, these four trees were still standing, living monuments to the labor of the Ancestral Puebloans whose contributions are too often underappreciated. I drew a long breath, eyeing the tree flaunting the yellow-red apples too high to reach. While contemplating the origin of the trees, an inner alarm went off; the kids were waiting, and we must get back.

A strain of affection had coursed through me when I discovered the line of four apple trees near the Quarai ruins and the gorgeous warblers and flycatchers clustered around their branches. It was a heady experience to find trees that were presumed dead—trees that had an uncanny ability to bring history to life. One of the four Quarai apple trees was dying or dead. Who will honor the trees when they are gone? The rangers are well-meaning but seem relatively new—I spoke to five or six, and no one knew about the apple trees. If we don’t know the trees, much less their significance, how can we honor these nurturing mothers, living witnesses to history, keepers of juicy secrets? Which songs will we sing when the ancient trees leave us?

When a beloved historic apple tree in the Pacific Northwest died in 2020, there was a considerable outcry. Rightly so. In contrast, even the Salinas rangers I spoke to didn’t know about a comparable treasure right under their noses. Perhaps with a turnover in positions, institutional memory has faded. Three gorgeous ruins remain of the Salinas settlements, and the New Mexico Bureau of Geology paper confirmed that the surviving stand of apple trees is located in the Quarai ruins. The paper characterized Quarai as nestled in a juniper forest, and ideal for apple growing since the land has natural springs. Tree-ring growth data estimated that the apple trees are from roughly 1800. Local legend has it that they were planted even earlier by the friars and early Spanish ranchers. If the Quarai trees are 224 years old, as per tree-ring estimates, they have outlived the Pacific Northwest’s oldest apple tree, believed to have germinated in 1826 or 1827, and died in 2020, at the age of 194.

Considering the forgotten Quarai apple trees, I wondered whose history is amplified and whose is all but forgotten. To widen our apple history, we may have to stretch our hearts and minds. Stretching isn’t always easy, but the process can inform how we envision our ecological future. I feel ebullient to think that remnants of our rich apple culture are alive with us even today. The Quarai trees are like the North Star, pointing the way to a richer way of seeing. They have been pointing for more than 200 years and, in my lifetime, will fade into oblivion.