ohn Chapman, (1768-1847) a follower of the theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, was a kindhearted oddball who supplied the American frontier with thousands of apple tree seedlings, young trees sprouted from apple seeds. As Johnny Appleseed, he has become one of this country's most enduring and beloved legends.

Apples can be propagated in two ways: by a type of cloning known as grafting and by planting the seeds from an apple. An apple grown from a seed doesn't "come true"-that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will be a wildling that bears little resemblance to its parent. The majority of apple trees grown in America during its first two centuries were grown from seed, their fruit generally ending up as cider. Thousands of years of natural hybridizing among a number of apple species has produced a rich genetic broth resulting in a great array of shapes, colors, size and tastes, as well as tree and fruit quality. This means that in the countless seedling orchards of colonial America, a large-scale genetic experiment was taking place. John Chapman, in customary ragged attire and toting bags of apple seeds, took this experiment to the Midwest. He traveled more than 100,000 miles, establishing and maintaining numerous apple nurseries in western New York, Ohio and Indiana which enabled the earliest settlers to plant orchards.