A Field Guide to Resurrection

The art collection that holds the memory of America's forgotten fruit.

Between 1886 and 1942, USDA artists painted over 7500 watercolors documenting America's incredible fruit diversity. The paintings vanished into government storage for decades until apple researchers and digital activists freed them, and they now serve as field guides for modern apple hunters tracking down “extinct” varieties still growing in forgotten orchards. This is the story of this incredible collection and why I built a website (pomological.art) to make them more accessible.

Practice resurrection.

— Wendell Berry

I. The Homesteader, the Artist, and the Apple

The prairie wind cut through Robert Edward Burns like a knife on that January evening in 1888, twenty degrees below zero, the kind of cold that would freeze a snot rocket halfway to the ground. He'd followed his older siblings out to Eastern Washington from the family's played-out farm in Kansas, and now here he stood at the foot of Steptoe Butte about to marry Mecie Hume, whose father had staked his claim here first among the flickering hills of wheat, whose bloodline snaked back to the King of Scotland before even the Normans arrived. The preacher's breath came out in white puffs as he read the vows while wedding guests stomped their feet and huffed on their chilled hands. When the sun came up next morning they were all still dancing.

Burns was twenty-three and land-hungry. He mortgaged his claim to buy fruit trees, betting everything on an orchard that could supply fruit to the growing towns of the Palouse. He and his new wife raised a homestead and had seven children on the northeast shoulder of the butte, planting wheat where the soil ran deep and apples across ravines and slopes to capture the water that ran down the mountain. Among the varieties he planted was one called Nero, named so by Italian immigrants in New Jersey for its red flesh so deep it was almost black, with yellow that tried to crawl out from underneath, one that kept long and would store easily through the bitter Palouse winter.

Across the country in the gaslit warmth of a Washington D.C. studio Deborah Griscom Passmore bent over her easel and studied the apple in front of her, another Nero. She was alone as always but for her cats Buttercup and Dandy Jim, pears from across America scattered on tables next to carob from Florida and a mangosteen sent from Trinidad and Tobago by the plant explorer David Fairchild. At fifty-two, she'd found her calling at a time when most women began to retreat into the sunset of their lives.

The final layer caught the light as she pulled back her brush, trying to capture the yellow blush that crept along the apple’s flanks. This one lacked the characteristic deep red of its brothers, had knobs instead of the usual idyllic roundness.

Neither artist nor homesteader nor apple knew their labors would soon vanish together. Passmore's paintings to disappear into government vaults for a century. Burns to abandon his dream within a decade and load his family into a wagon bound west for gentler country while creditors claimed his land. And the Nero, despite its brief commercial success, to fade from memory, written off as extinct by everyone who bothered to keep track. But while the paintings gathered dust and the homestead crumbled and the apple vanished from catalogs, the trees themselves grew on in Steptoe's soil, drinking from hidden springs, bearing fruit that fell and rotted season after season.

II. The Golden Age

Burns, Passmore, and the Nero were all products of an explosion of agricultural possibility unlike anything seen in America before or since, driven by restless energies that would eventually consume what they created. It was the the gilded age. Equal parts greed and wonder, manic colonial impulse and genuine curiosity, all wrapped up in the collective understanding that America would rise or fall on the backs of its farmers. One in which botanist W.H. Ragan had catalogued fourteen thousand distinct varieties of apples growing raucous across the country's seedling orchards. The Nero that Passmore painted was only one sliver of this magnificent chaos.

Abe Lincoln had lit the fuse thirty years earlier. In 1862, while civil war raged around him, he signed a cascade of legislation that embodied the nation's contradictory impulses. First came the USDA, with the mandate to find and distribute new varieties of plants. A week later the Homestead Act flung open the western frontier. Then the Pacific Railway Act and Morrill Act, which formed the land grant colleges and set in motion the railroads that would carry the products of industrialization to every corner of the continent.

He called the USDA The People's Department, and for a time it was exactly that. By the end of the century they had sent out a billion free seed packets to farmers, and gathered up samples of a staggering array of apples planted across the growing nation in seedling orchards to catalogue them. The young Kansas native David Fairchild created the Department of Seed and Plant Introduction mostly by sheer force of will and spent the next few decades directing a cadre of restless wanderers to tramp across the globe in search of new plants that would revolutionize American agriculture.

Fairchild alone shipped two hundred thousand plants home over his career. He smuggled citrons from Corsica and deglet noor dates from Algeria, collected mangoes from India, stole Bavarian hops. Wilson Popenoe hauled pound-heavy avocados from the Guatemalan jungle and wrote the bible of tropical fruit. The Dutchman Frank Meyer walked thousands of miles across Asia, shipped back soybeans and the Beijing lemon hybrid that bears his name, found wild ginkgos and asparagus, always roving until he disappeared from a river boat and washed up dead on the Yangtze River. These men became folk heroes, featured in silent films and written chronicles.¹ They represented the national spirit at the time, what Fairchild called the burning curiosity for newness, the instinct to feel around in the dark and stumble headlong toward the unknown.

III. Zen and the Art of Painting Apples

Exotic fruits arrived weekly. Kiwis from China and persimmons from Japan and sapodillas from the Yucatan. Endless variations emerged from America's own orchards. But all this novelty came with a price. The same apple sold under a dozen names across different states, and crooked nurserymen peddled inferior stock as famous varieties. Some resorted to midnight raids, sneaking into rival nurseries to steal cuttings. Farmers ordering by mail had no way to verify what they'd actually receive. Like an adderalled out pre-med trying to scribble every word that leaves the professor's mouth, the USDA was, to put it mildly, overwhelmed.

So in 1886, the newly established Division of Pomology buckled down and embarked on what seemed an impossible task: hire artists to paint every significant variety of fruit in America. This was the project that put the Nero apple on Passmore's easel in her Washington studio. What followed was a fifty-six-year artistic odyssey that produced more than 7500 watercolors documenting fruit from 29 countries and 51 states and territories.

The paintings married beauty with utility, serving as technical documents that revealed what early color photography could not. The subtle gradations of color and texture that made one apple variety distinct from another, the rough yellow-brown that makes a Roxbury Russet what it is. Every painting bore its provenance: Golden Russet Cherimoya, C.P. Taft, Orange, CA Lady Mango, Chemical Bureau, Havana, Cuba; Comice Pear, Hillcrest Orchard, Medford OR.

The USDA distributed them as lithographs in bulletins that farmers used for identification. Some were deliberately painted in states of decay or disease to teach farmers what to watch out for, marked as maturity tests or studies on the effects of cold storage.

Three women dominated the collection, painting more than half the watercolors and finding in government work one of the few professional opportunities available to female artists. Amanda Almira Newton, granddaughter of the USDA's first commissioner, painted over 1200 watercolors and pioneered incredibly realistic, true-to-size wax models. Mary Daisy Arnold quietly produced over a thousand works across thirty-six years, her steady hand documenting everything from Mission olives to the American Chinquapin.

But Passmore stands as the collection's undisputed master. She never married, devoting herself entirely to her craft. In twenty years she produced more than 1500 paintings, stopped only by the heart attack that felled her in 1911. Her technique was obsessive. At times she would use more than a hundred washes to achieve the exact effect she sought. Botanist Edward Lee Greene marveled at her work: Never in any book did I see a plate that looked as if the original equaled these; I did not know that they could be painted with such perfection.

IV. Into the Vault

By the time the program ended in 1942, the collection had become a monument to a world slipping away. The nation that beget fourteen thousand unique apple varieties strained under the weight of its own efficiency. Machined and chemicals crowded out human labor. What Wendell Berry called the unsettling of America was steamrolling the country, and would only accelerate through the 20th century as the hungry industrial logic that had cracked open the world and unveiled its botanical treasures turned inward and devoured itself.

The American Seed Trade Association killed the government's free seed program in 1924, the opening shot in a century-long war that would end with four corporate giants swallowing most of the world's commercial seed supply. Farmers, who had saved seeds for ten thousand years, now signed contracts promising to buy fresh each season, their fields planted with hybrids bred for yield and uniformity. The number of apples Americans could name dwindled to a handful of commercial survivors that held up on the railroads, that stayed tough and bright and waxy. The emphasis in a Red Delicious skewed ever further towards the red and away from the delicious.

The paintings themselves suffered a similar fate. After 1942 they languished in government storage, surviving Washington's humid summers by luck more than design. Even after their 1969 move to the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland, they remained invisible to all but a handful of dedicated researchers.

But a few apple junkies refused to let them die. Lee Calhoun discovered them in the late 1970s, trudging down fourteen floors of the library until curators led him to a steamy room in the sub-basement. His 1995 book Old Southern Apples featured more than a hundred color reproductions from the collection, the first time these works reached the general public. Dan Bussey began his own quest in 1989, making pilgrimages throughout the 90s and 2000s, poring over thousands of apple paintings and their histories. His thirty-year obsession eventually became the massive seven-volume Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada. When no publisher would take it, Kent Whealy founded Jak Kaw Press to get it into print.

Whealy understood better than anyone what was at stake. As co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange, he had spent decades rescuing heritage varieties from extinction and many an afternoon at the USDA National Agricultural Library researching old heirloom fruit. He'd watched the century-old paintings slowly deteriorate in storage while federal budget cuts made it clear preservation would never happen at the government level. When he joined the board of the Ceres Trust in 2009, he saw his chance to act.

The Ceres Trust proved the perfect partner: a foundation dedicated to supporting organic agriculture and preserving America’s disappearing genetic heritage. At Whealy's urging, they cut a check for nearly $300k to digitize the lot. But then the government did what governments do best. The USDA digitized the paintings and promptly locked them behind a paywall. Low-resolution teaser images went online for free, but the good stuff, the high-res files that could really show you the distinctive stripes on a Gravenstein apple, cost ten bucks apiece. Over nearly four years, this brilliant revenue scheme generated a whopping $565.

After stumbling across the collection in 2015 and hitting the paywall, public domain activist Parker Higgins got fired up. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request that laid bare the government's pathetic revenue figures, then wrote a blog post that went viral and shamed the USDA into dropping their paywall later that year. After decades of bureaucratic limbo, the paintings were finally, truly free.

V. Finding the Lost

Can you call it resurrection when nothing has died?

In 2020, retired FBI agent David Benscoter climbed Steptoe butte on what had become a familiar quest. Seven years he'd been hunting the ghosts of Palouse orchards through The Lost Apple Project, sweet-talking old-timers and rifling through moldering county fair records, nursery catalogues, yellowed newspapers. Amid the ruins of the Burns homestead he found a century-old scraggly tree still bearing fruit. The apple he bit into was the Nero, confirmed against historical descriptions and nine watercolors spanning thirty years, the first painted by Passmore in 1894.

Benscoter wasn't alone. Across the country in North Carolina, retired engineer Tom Brown had spent twenty years knocking on doors throughout Appalachia, chasing stories whispered by old folks about trees they'd known in their youth. One conversation led to another, one tree to the next, until he'd tracked down more than a thousand varieties that most had written off as extinct.

Brown’s best advice on finding lost apples is simple: talk to old people about apples. But once grandad gives you a clue that the lanky tree in his backyard might be something special, the watercolors are often the only visual thread connecting you to an apple's history. They become your field guide to resurrection.

Send samples to Washington State University for DNA analysis.² If it doesn't match anything on record, you might have yourself a Lazarus. That's what happened when the Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project matched fruit from a lone tree to four paintings of the Colorado Orange, a variety that had once made Stark Bros 100 Best Apples of All-Time list before vanishing into memory.

Today the collection exists everywhere and nowhere at once. The physical paintings rest in climate-controlled storage at the National Agricultural Library. Digital versions live scattered across USDA's Digital Collections, Wikimedia Commons, and the Internet Archive. The 2021 book An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts³ brought the collection to coffee tables nationwide, with essays by Michael Pollan and John McPhee. Higgins even created a Twitter bot that posts a random painting every three hours, now on Bluesky.

But finding the right painting in this digital diaspora is like hunting through an unindexed library. The paintings exist but you have to know what you’re looking for. And even that requires quite a bit of clicking and scrolling and patience, and the kind of good eye that comes from staring at thousands of apple paintings until you can spot a pippin in the rough.

VI. Paying Attention

So, building on the work of many others, I created pomological.art. The site lets you filter the collection by crop type, search by variety name, browse by artist or range of years. You can trace the crab apples that came from Fargo or the lemons that traveled from Corfu on a map, examine paintings that document plant diseases and damage, learn about the lives of the artists or see how Passmore's technique evolved across her twenty years of work. The variety groupings reveal subtle differences, how a Nero from the late 1800s looks different from one in the 1920s. I also made a Chrome extension that shows a random painting each time you open a new tab, injecting some botanical wonder into your digital routine. I guarantee you'll stumble upon fruit you've never heard of.

But why bother? Do these paintings matter beyond historical curiosity, something nice to look at on a coffee table? Should they interest anyone besides eccentric retirees who'd be combing beaches with metal detectors or building scale models of British naval frigates from the Napoleonic wars if they weren't hunting apples?

I think they matter as much as they did 140 years ago. At least I hope they do, since I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time digging up pomological folklore and making a website about century-old fruit paintings.

Making cider has dragged me into an obsession with the varieties themselves. Their particularity, how they twisted through local cultures, the strangeness of their stories. It’s why I called the cidery Landrace. A landrace is a variety coevolved with a place and a people. It has a character no one planned. People simply chose what thrived in their particular place, grafting and saving seed and breeding their best animals, generation after generation, until what emerged couldn't be separated from the soil that birthed it. Arkansas Black apples that withstood scorching southern summers, Hopi corn that thrived in desert sand, Mangalitza pigs that grew woolly coats to weather Hungarian winters.

A coworker made the mistake of asking me about apples recently and got a full primer on apple genetics and the Hawkeye to Red Delicious saga. His eyes started to glaze over some but I was on a role and had to finish with the $10 million twenty-five-year breeding process of the Cosmic Crisp and its marketing budget. At that point he lit up: That’s my favorite apple!

I resisted the urge to bang my head on the table. The Cosmic Crisp isn't a bad eating apple. But when you're watching baseball, who do you root for? The rich kid who grew up going to elite pitching camps, whose parents installed a batting cage in their garage and sit in the stands of every game biting their fingernails, or the kid who materialized out of some Carribean dust firing hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs?

The watercolors are the fruit equivalent of Dominican kids who grew up hurling ragballs and swinging mango tree branches. Seedlings who by grace or good luck sprung up into something magic. And the pomological collection as a whole serves as a visual baseline of what American agricultural diversity once looked like, and what it could become again. Every lost apple found and saved is a rejection of the modern disease of uniformity and scale and global sameness, the reduction of our taste to whichever handful of grocery store varieties have the best marketing.

Each name is a small poem, each variety bound to a particular time and place and culture, some lost forever. But some still exist, hanging by threads of oral tradition and local knowledge. Come across a Nun’s Thigh pear or a Sops of Wine apple enough times in these paintings and you might find yourself knocking on your neighbor's door asking about the backyard apple trees his long-passed grannie planted.

Maybe to practice resurrection means only to start paying attention.

1. The films are on youtube and pretty fascinating:

2. This is actually pretty simple to do, and anyone can send in samples: https://myfruittree.org.

3. If anybody wants to buy me a copy I’d be grateful.