Story behind the art of Mary Elcano
Botanical Art Worldwide 2025-A More Abundant Future:
Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field
American Society of Botanical Artists at the Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, MO
Hewes Crab Apple
Malus cv.
The Hewes Crab Apple, Malus cv., is my watercolor painting of crab apples that date back to colonial Virginia in the 1700s. Like other North American apples cultivated for hundreds of years, the Hewes Crab has been grown for over 300 years. The Hewes Crab also features in my Early American Apples project, which is a book including 13 watercolor paintings of apples first grown in the 13 original colonies. The book delves into the 13 apples’ unique stories and provides an overview of significant botanical and historical information.
The genesis of my colonial apple project was an art workshop on heirloom apples with Anne-Marie Evans, MBE, renowned botanical artist and teacher. In the workshop, I painted the Pennsylvania Smokehouse, Malus domestica, which had been grown in the US for over 200 years. Around 1800, a colonial Pennsylvania farmer discovered an apple tree growing next to his smokehouse and named its apples Smokehouse. I wondered if that apple tree grew near where my ancestors lived in colonial days.
Before entering the art world, I studied history, then law, and followed a legal career. So, I have a strong background in research. I have traced my family’s early American lineage to the mid-seventeenth century from my mother, Marian (née Sebring) Elcano. By the 1650s, our relatives of Roelof Lukassen Sebring’s family, associated with Peter Stuyvesant, emigrated from the Netherlands to New York. In time, my Sebring family settled in Pennsylvania, not far from where the Smokehouse apple eventually grew.
Intrigued, I launched into further research on other apples growing in colonial America. An ancestor of the modern cultivated apple was Malus sieversii, which originated millions of years ago in the Tian Shan Mountain region of Kazakhstan and China. Moving west along the Silk Road, the Malus sieversii gained genetic characteristics from two other wild apples – the Malus orientalis in the Caucasus and Northern Turkey, and the Malus sylvestris in Western Europe. These three ancient species contributed to the evolution of the Malus domestica and Malus pumila, the apples the European colonists grew in North America. These North American apples have an interesting botanical story.
When European settlers landed in Virginia in 1607 and in Massachusetts in 1620, they faced a surprise. They disembarked to find no large European-style apples growing in North America. Instead, only a few small, native crab apples grew, which the settlers called “common” or “wild” apples. These small, native crab apples were so sour, they were known as “spitters.” In his article, “Wild Apples” (The Atlantic Monthly, 1862), Henry David Thoreau described the crab apple’s bitter taste as “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.”
In addition to no European apples, the colonists faced another unexpected challenge. No honeybees! They were the required pollinators for European apple blossoms to set. In the early 1600s, however, no honeybees lived in North America. Native American bees did not pollinate the European apple blossoms. Apple trees grew but did not produce apples. Colonists resolved this in the 1620s only after they shipped honeybees from England. As a result, many new, remarkable apples evolved, including the Hewes Crab Apple and the 12 other apples in my Early American Apples project.
Creighton Lee Calhoun, Jr., in Old Southern Apples (pub. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011) describes the Hewes Crab, Malus cv., as a small apple measuring about an inch and a half in diameter, with a green-yellow skin when young, turning yellow and ripening in September. Because the fruit is small and hard, it survives falls from the tree without much bruising. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington planted acres of Hewes Crabs in their orchards.
Calhoun explains that the most important crab apple product in colonial America was cider. While crab apples are often bitter, when blended with sweeter apples they produce very good cider. Cider was essential as a convenient and healthy drink in the colonies and could be made at home. It was safer than the bacteria-filled water prevalent throughout colonial America. The Hewes Crab was added to create a delicious, cinnamon-flavored cider with a sugary and pungent taste, contributing to its reputation as the most popular apple in eighteenth century Virginia.
The crab apples in my painting for A More Abundant Future are from a Hewes Crab sapling which grew in the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants at Monticello. I contacted the curator to confirm the scientific name of the Hewes Crab apple. She informed me the Hewes Crab is a cultivated cider apple believed to be a complex cross between the native Virginia crab apple, Malus angustifolia, and the domesticated European apple of horticulture, Malus pumila cv. and has the scientific name Malus cv.
In conclusion, the Early American Apples project was my fascinating journey through history to paint 13 colonial apples and record their stories. The Hewes Crab painting was significant given its beautiful color harmony. It was also remarkable among the other historic apples in my project as it was the only crab apple. I submitted the Hewes Crab watercolor painting for A More Abundant Future because of its important history in colonial America, and its international status as an apple variety cultivated 300 years ago from a native colonial crab apple and a domesticated European apple.
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