One of North America’s oldest apple trees found on Maine island

A rare, historically significant French apple tree discovered on a Verona Island farm by College of the Atlantic professor Todd Little-Siebold and his COA Maine Apple Lab is one of the oldest in North America.

This apple tree is small and unassuming compared to others around it on a Verona Island farm. But only this one is a very old, very rare ... — This apple tree is small and unassuming compared to others around it on a Verona Island farm. But only this one is a very old, very rare cultivar likely dating back to the area’s 17th-century French settlers.

Called the Drap d’Or de Bretagna, the cultivar came from the Brittany region of France and was likely brought to Maine by Castine’s early French settlers in the late 1600s.

The tree, believed to be a direct descendant of early plantings, was rediscovered by a group of local “apple explorers” who are passionate about old apples and what they reveal about history.

The discovery provides important new genetic information about the ancestry of apple trees in Maine and around the country. On top of that, one researcher said, its large, yellow fruit is delicious, and Mainers might be able to grow them in the future.

When historian and apple researcher Todd Little-Siebold saw the tree on Verona for the first time, it looked “completely and utterly visually unremarkable” — small and scrawny compared to other big, hearty apple trees around it.