Fruit Trees

The apple that everyone wants to grow and almost nobody should.

Honeycrisp is the most popular apple in America and one of the worst choices for a backyard grower. This is not a contradiction. It's a cautionary tale about the distance between eating a fruit and growing it. At the grocery store, Honeycrisp is perfect — crisp, sweet-tart, juicy in a way that makes other apples feel like they're not even trying. In your yard, it's a high-maintenance disaster.

It's susceptible to bitter pit, fire blight, and scab. It bears biennially unless you thin aggressively, which means standing in your yard in June pulling baby apples off a tree and feeling like a monster. It needs a pollinator partner, which means buying a second tree you didn't budget for. And the fruit bruises if you look at it wrong.

If you want a great backyard apple, plant a Liberty. Plant an Enterprise. Plant a Freedom — yes, that's a real cultivar, and it's disease-resistant and productive and everything Honeycrisp isn't when nobody's watching. But you won't, because your heart is set on Honeycrisp, and you'll learn all of this the hard way. We all did.

Editor's note: The best eating apple. The worst backyard apple. The full tragedy of wanting what you can't easily have.

The genus name is Greek for "fruit of the gods." Most people's only experience is biting an unripe one and losing the ability to feel their tongue.

That's the whole reputation problem. Somebody eats a green persimmon, gets a tannin event that rewires their relationship with fruit, and never goes back. Unripe American persimmon is the most astringent thing you will ever voluntarily put in your mouth. Your tongue goes chalky. Your brain files the entire species under "never again." But the ripe fruit — soft, orange, falling-off-the-tree ripe — tastes like honey and dates and apricots conspired in a Southern kitchen. Native Americans made bread from it. Settlers baked it into pudding and fermented it into beer. The fruit literally evolved to be eaten by mastodons. A 2015 study found that elephant digestion improved seed germination. This tree has been waiting ten thousand years for its dispersal partner to come back. You'll have to do.

Thirty to sixty feet. Alligator bark — dark gray, square blocks, easiest winter ID in the eastern woods. Dioecious, so you need two trees or a named cultivar that sets fruit without pollination. 'Prok' for flavor. 'Early Golden' for volume. Larval host for the luna moth. The heartwood is actual ebony — same genus as the tropical stuff in piano keys — but takes a century to develop, so don't get ideas. Zone 4 through 9. Drought tolerant. No real pest or disease issues. Deep taproot makes it hard to transplant, which is why nurseries don't stock it, which is why you've never seen one, which is why you planted a Bradford pear instead. That's not an accusation. It's a diagnosis.

Editor's note: Learn what ripe means. Not firm. Not almost. Ripe means ugly, soft, and falling. That's when it's perfect. Everything before that is a trap.

The fruit tree that would rather be a thicket than a specimen, and is right about that.

One of the first things to bloom in spring — white five-petaled flowers in clusters before the leaves, fragrant enough to stop you on a trail and say "what is that." Honeybees and native bees pile in. Then it disappears into the background while everything else in the garden has its moment. Then in August, small round plums appear, yellow blushing red, with skins so tart they'll make your face do things, and flesh so sweet and juicy you immediately forgive the skin. Crack them open. Eat the inside. Make jam with the rest. Make fruit leather if you've got buckets. Indigenous peoples across the continent ate them fresh, dried them like prunes, planted groves so frequently that half the places called "Crab Orchard" in the eastern U.S. are named for what was growing there. The Cheyenne used the branches for the Sun Dance. The Navajo made red dye from the roots.

Fifteen to twenty-five feet tall. Thorny. Suckering. This is the part that scares tidy gardeners away and makes wildlife managers plant it by the hundreds. Left alone, American plum sends root suckers in every direction and forms dense, thorny thickets that become nesting habitat for songbirds, escape cover for rabbits, winter shelter for deer, and foraging stops for turkeys, grouse, foxes, and anything else that eats fruit or needs a place to hide. It is a whole ecosystem pretending to be a shrub. Hardy to minus forty. Resistant to black knot, which destroys European plums. Grows fast — sometimes five feet the first year from seed. Zones 3 through 8. Not for the small garden bed. Not sorry about it.

Editor's note: Every landscaper will tell you it's aggressive. Every bird in the county will tell you it's home.

The worst tree in America and it's not even close.

Smells like rotting fish. Splits in half in every ice storm. Sold for decades as sterile, which was a lie — it cross-pollinates with other Callery cultivars, produces viable seed, gets spread by birds, and the offspring revert to thorny invasive monsters that are currently swallowing pastures and roadsides across the eastern United States. Ohio banned it. Pennsylvania banned it. South Carolina banned it. More states are coming. Multiple cities give you a free native tree if you cut yours down. A bounty. On a tree that nurseries were pushing on every subdivision in the country forty years ago. That's the arc of the Bradford pear — from "perfect street tree" to criminal in two generations.

It lives maybe 25 years. It grows fast with narrow crotch angles that guarantee structural failure — not if, when. A moderate wind event turns your front yard into a crime scene of shattered limbs. The flowers are white, abundant, and smell like a dumpster behind a seafood restaurant. The fall color is fine. It supports essentially zero caterpillar species, which means it's a green desert for birds during nesting season. A native wild plum blooms earlier, smells better, feeds wildlife, makes actual fruit you can eat, forms protective thickets for nesting birds, and doesn't split in half on a Tuesday in March. But it's not shaped like a lollipop, so developers went with the Bradford.

Editor's note: If you have one, cut it down. Your state might literally hand you a serviceberry for doing it. That's not gardening advice. That's public policy.

The most romantic tree in the world until it finds your sewer line.

Everyone has a weeping willow memory. Climbing one at a neighbor's house. Reading under one in a park. A painting. A poem. A movie where someone cries next to one, which is apparently what they're for. The weeping willow exists in the cultural imagination as a graceful, poetic, timeless presence — and in actual yards as a fast-growing, short-lived, root-invading, branch-dropping, pipe-destroying catastrophe that no honest landscaper will recommend and no nursery wants on its conscience.

Not even American. It's a hybrid of a Chinese species and a European species. Linnaeus named it babylonica because he thought it was the biblical tree by the rivers of Babylon. It wasn't. Those were probably poplars. So even its origin story is wrong. It grows insanely fast — which sounds great until you learn that fast wood is weak wood. Branches snap in every ice storm, every windstorm, every moderately ambitious Tuesday. It drops twigs constantly. The roots spread up to three times the width of the canopy and they are biological divining rods for water. If there is a crack in your sewer pipe or a leak in your foundation, the willow will find it. It doesn't care about your plumbing. It cares about its thirst.

It is, admittedly, gorgeous. Nothing else moves like a weeping willow in a breeze. Nothing else makes that light. If you have a big pond on a big property with no pipes underneath and no structures nearby and you accept that you're planting a beautiful, high-maintenance, short-lived mess — go for it. Everyone else is just planting a future plumber's invoice.

Editor's note: Plant it by the pond on the back forty. Not by the house. Not near the septic. Not in the front yard. By the pond. On the back forty. That you don't have.

Honeycrisp's kid. Ten-million-dollar marketing campaign. Its own Instagram. A former NASA astronaut as brand ambassador. For an apple.

Twenty-two years from cross to grocery store. WSU horticulturist Bruce Barritt pollinated Enterprise with Honeycrisp in 1997, trying to get the crunch of one and the storage life of the other. Thousands of hybrid seeds. Decades of evaluation. One winner. The mother tree is still growing in a Wenatchee orchard like a retired athlete who knows what she did. First commercial sale: December 1, 2019, at a QFC in Seattle. The New York Times called it 'dramatically dark, richly flavored apple.' Astronaut Leland Melvin got hired to tell people about it. A children's musical was written. This apple got a Coming of Age narrative arc.

Here's the thing though: it's actually great. Firm without being hard. Sweet and tart in balance. Doesn't brown when you cut it. Stores for over a year in cold storage and improves with age, which is a flex no other apple can pull off. Sixth most-produced apple in the U.S. as of 2025 and climbing. Washington growers had exclusive North American rights through 2027, and they've planted fifteen million trees. It's expected to replace Red Delicious, which has been coasting on name recognition since Reagan was president.

Can you grow one? Sure — if you're in Washington. The patent belongs to WSU. Everyone else gets to buy them at the store and feel feelings about it.

Editor's note: Twenty-two years, thousands of crosses, millions of trees, one NASA astronaut, and a children's musical. All to replace the Red Delicious. Honestly? Worth it.

Cornell spent forty years breeding a better pancake.

That's reductive. But also true. The Cornell Sugar Maple Improvement Program started with one question — can you breed a tree with sweeter sap — and answered it with decades of cloning, progeny testing, and tapping seven-year-old saplings in upstate New York winters. They cloned the sweetest trees. Grew seeds from those clones. Tapped the offspring. Found that yes, genetics determine sugar content, and yes, you can select for it. The best performers went to a seed orchard in Lake Placid, which is the most New York sentence in this entire project. The result: a sugar maple that produces sweeter sap in greater volume, which means less boiling, less fuel, and more syrup per tap. For an industry where forty gallons of sap makes one gallon of syrup, that math changes everything.

But here's what nobody in the syrup world mentions enough: it's also just a sugar maple. Sixty to seventy-five feet tall. The fall color that built New England tourism. Shade so dense you can read under it in August. The leaf on the Canadian flag. Hardwood so strong they make bowling alleys out of it. Deep-rooted, hydraulic-lifting, shade-tolerant, long-lived — centuries, not decades. Wildlife shelter, songbird habitat, samara-spinning helicopters that every kid has thrown into the air.

The tree must be thirty to forty years old and ten inches across before you can tap it, which means planting one is a letter to the future. You're not growing this for yourself. You're growing it for whoever's standing in your yard with a drill and a bucket in 2060. Needs moist well-drained soil, doesn't tolerate compaction or urban abuse. Otherwise it just becomes a tree and then an heirloom.

Editor's note: Plant it now. Your grandkids will make pancakes under it and they won't know your name but they'll know you did something right.

An edible hedge that looks like cotton candy in April and got dumped by American agriculture in 1940 for not being convenient enough.

Introduced to the U.S. in 1882. Breeding programs in the 1920s were selecting for bigger, sweeter fruit. Then everybody wandered off to work on crops that shipped better, and the Nanking cherry just vanished from the conversation. No named cultivars survived. Everything sold today is seedling-grown, which means every bush is a genetic dice roll on flavor. An entire fruit crop, abandoned mid-sentence because it didn't fit on a truck. That's American agriculture in one line.

Six to ten feet tall. Dense, fuzzy — tomentosa means hairy and it earns it. Pink buds open to white flowers so thick on the stems you'd think someone decorated the shrub for a wedding. Sets fruit through late frosts that flatten everything else in the yard. Scarlet cherries in June, half-inch, sweet-tart, big pit, tiny payoff per fruit — you'll be standing there a while. But a loaded bush fills a bucket, and that bucket becomes pie, jam, jelly, or wine depending on your ambition and your afternoon.

Or skip the bucket. The robins, turkeys, and waxwings don't care about your pit-to-flesh ratio. They'll strip it in a week and repay you by using it as their hiding spot for the rest of the time, which is a better deal than most relationships. Hardy to minus forty. Any soil that drains. Copper bark that nobody notices until January, when it's the best thing in the yard. Not self-fertile, so plant two — which is fine, because one was never going to be enough fruit anyway.

Editor's note: Russia kept breeding it. Eastern Europe kept planting it. We went back to buying Rainiers at eight dollars a pound. Choices were made.