I have honestly not been impressed with any of the red fleshed apple varieties. Scarlet Surprise and Pink Pearl taste okay but are tart and relatively bland in flavor. Scarlet Surprise is also quite juicy and I have made an okay pink cider out of it but nothing to rave about. These are okay as novelty items but not of any real value when it comes to flavor. I have tasted several others and they are typically even more tart and not as palatable as those two. I guess you could say, they all make me yawn when it comes to real flavor, which is what I am after.

The "blushing" apples are a particular favorite of mine. I became smitten upon trying a Pink Pearl at the HOS fruit tasting show a few years ago and promptly ordered a tree. I'm not normally a big apple fan, but the Pink Pearl's perfect sweet-tart blend had me hooked, plus it is just so darned pretty. Being the plant geek that I am, I did some research and found that the breeder of many red-fleshed apples was Albert Etter. Mr. Etter (circa 1900) was a plant breeder and orchardist in California who developed Pink Pearl and other apples. His history, and the effort to save his historic apples and breed new blushing apples from his lines can be read on the Greenmantle Nursery website [url:1yzvrdjk]http://www.greenmantlenursery.com/2008revision/fruit2008/etter-apples2008.htm[/url:1yzvrdjk].

I don't grow it Arlies Red Flesh, but hope to get it this year. The name hidden rose is a trademark name, which annoyingly confuses the naming issue. Arlies Red Flesh isn't maybe that saleable, but continually adding trademark names confuses consumers and enthusiasts... and really everyone. We have a similar problem with the Etter Reds from greenmantle. They only have Trademark names. Once they are known only under those names, greenmantle can try to claim a fee for the use of the name until the trademark fails to hold up in court, which does happen. My friends have a small commercial orchard and were contacted by the guy who claims a trademark on the name hidden rose requesting fees. Every variety should have one common, untrademarked name, and in my opinion, that name should be a classic name, not a number or whatever. Why? because every variety goes out of patent, and in the case of the apples trademarked by greenmantle, there is no patent anyway. People can keep adding trademarked names, but if the fruit has one common name, then there is at least an anchor in the sea. What will happen is that anyone who does not want to pay the trademark fee will just rename the apple leading ultimately to confusion. Also, as fruit enthusiasts, we should ideally use the common name and put trademark names as an after thought. Like I said, that's a problem if you want to sell an apple at the farmer's market and it's name is R2D2211p! This article on the abuse of plant trademark names is really outstanding and solidified my observations and limited knowledge. http://www.plantdelights.com/Article-Tr ... rticulture I'd love to hear from anyone that grows it. I've heard mixed reviews, but regionality is always good to keep in mind. (that link takes me to their home page for some reason. The article is the misuse of trademark names in horticulture under tab LEARN> PLANT ARTICLES> the URL seems right, but they are redirecting or something...?)

Steven, What you're saying about trademarks really resonates with me. I'd like to see the article that you referenced but the website must have taken it down or something. One Green World has trade marked their Cornus mas but thankfully they still occasionally have the true name in the description. Yellow is Yantarny, Sunrise is Marina, Red Star is Vidubetskii, etc. This could really get confusing all across the board.

The article is there. They are redirecting that address to the home page for some reason. click the LEARN tab, then the PLANT ARTICLES tab and scroll down the page. It's there. The argument is simple. That rules were established for plant nomenclature that each plant should have a common name that is the reference point to avoid confusing everyone. Naming a plant with a number or giving it a trademark name only, mean that it get's called by it's trademark only, which assures the trademark holder more profit. In the case of OGW, they probably just do it to look like they have something unique with a nifty marketable name, or maybe they think they can popularize stuff under the new name and it will funnel traffic to them or mean that they can collect royalties if it become well known. Either way, it's rather annoying. It puts small growers and collectors in an odd spot. What does a grower do if they want to grow gold rush and sell it? They can't call it coop 38 if they want to sell apples and having a trademark name is a disincentive. If they rename it, then everyone loses track of what's what and they lose the advantage of selling a popular apple with a known name... and further popularizing that apple under a common name that everyone can use and know. It's just a way of trying to hold onto profit after a patent runs out. At least Cripps Pink has a real name, although it's not exactly a classic! Still, with the trademark pink lady being so well known, we can hardly converse about it without qualification. I'm thinking a good convention is to use the real name and put the trademark name in quotes.

What it comes down to, yet again, is a conflict of interests. Our interests as the public, and as collectors, are not the same as those of large scale breeders and the universities that fund them and whoever funds those. They produce some good work, but I guess I'm unconvinced that tactics like this are necessary for the work to occur. I think the focus used to be more altruistic and ultimately for the public good, whereas now tactics are increasingly about profit motives and extending those as far down the line as possible. Patents have been extended to pollen now and the way things are going, it seems likely that public interest will continue to be marginalized. There is probably no better way to take our interest back, or put it to the forefront, than participating in homescale breeding and growing, and basically getting back to more the way things used to be where we are involved with that sort of thing. By choosing to let go of that, we have handed over our interest and power to increasingly powerful money interests. My latest blog post was on making multi-grafted "frankentrees". I think for fruit, popularizing that idea is a perfect way to bring diversity back to our lives and the table in a way that can make issues like this less abstract. Point being that we can't just talk about food diversity and leave it up to a few hip farmers out there, we have to take back our role in the whole thing to reclaim the soul of our food so it's not a painted whore on a shelf in some store given a fancy working name disguising the humiliation and battering it went through on it's way there. Sorry to be so blunt and no offense to prostitution which I don't actually see negatively as an idea, but I think in the worst sense of the real life phenomenon, characterized by abuse and disempowerment, it's a valid analogy.

I read a lot of old literature on apples and the fruit working groups of the past were always getting together and trying to sort out confusion around common names in different regions. The also seemed to be re-naming them a lot, which must have added to the confusion. i'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like we need one because, thanks to the internet, fruit hobbyism is growing rapidly from what I can tell, and so is public interests and diversity on small scale operations. Maybe a group like HOS or some central place, could keep a database of names. As a community, we could give common names in a democratic way to fruits that have unusable numbers for names or to those that have only trademark names, and popularize those in the name of the public interest, in which I would include small scale growers. The article does say that if a plant or thing becomes known only by it's trademark name, the trademark can lose it's validity. I think the gist was that a trademark should be about who the company and the marketer are as a brand identifier, rather than what the object is. If it becomes what the object is universally known as, there are grounds to challenge it. I'm as tempted as the next person to re-name stuff bearing dumb or unusable names. It would be nice if we weren't forced into that position whenever possible though. I'd like to hear more thoughts on this, because I've been thinking about it quite a bit and what the best solution is for the public interest.

i have the red-flesh variety Firecracker. Had our first one this year, a little on the small side but it was tasty, although a bug got a third of it.