Last updated: January 26, 2021
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Circle of Life for an Apple Tree
Photo/NPS/Fort Vancouver
Vancouver’s Old Apple Tree, nearly 200 years old and historically associated with Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver, died in late June 2020 from natural causes.
It was the oldest apple tree in the State of Washington—maybe the oldest in the Pacific Northwest—maybe the oldest on the West Coast— and is said to have been planted from seed around 1826 by Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) personnel, perhaps Chief Factor John McLaughlin himself. Once it had grown sturdy enough to survive, the sapling was transplanted to a residential yard in HBC’s employees village, outside the fort. The Old Apple Tree was an English Greening variety, which bears a tart, green fruit used by 19th century housewives for baking purposes.
In the 1970s it was threatened by the proposed widening of Interstate 5, but intervention from state senators caused the freeway project to be redesigned to save the tree in place. The city of Vancouver then established a park to protect it and has looked after it ever since.
Anticipating the demise of the venerable old tree, arborists, city foresters, and the National Park Service about 11 years ago began nurturing live suckers from the tree’s root system. Those are now about 18 feet tall. One is to be cultivated into the center of the parent tree’s stump, and others will be transplanted to the orchards of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.