Apple sleuths hunt Northwest for varieties believed extinct

In this Oct. 30, 2019, photo, Joanie Cooper, of the Temperate Orchard Conservancy, compares a rare apple to a 1908 watercolor illustration of the same variety in a U.S. Department of Agriculture book, as she works in her lab in Molalla, Oregon. The apple is a Rhode Island Greening, a heritage variety that was once popular but has now become extremely rare in the U.S. Cooper and her colleagues have helped identify many of the 13 "lost" apple varieties that have been rediscovered in recent years by the Lost Apple Project in eastern Washington and northern Idaho. (AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus)

PULLMAN, Wash. — A team of amateur botanists is combing parts of the Pacific Northwest in search of long-lost apple varieties.

The non-profit Lost Apple Project hopes to rediscover varieties of apples long thought to be extinct that may still be growing in forgotten orchards.

Most of the apples they have found in eastern Washington and northern Idaho were planted by white settlers who moved west in the mid- to late-1800s.

So far, David Benscoter and E.J. Brandt have found 13 long-lost apple varieties and taken cuttings so they can be cloned and grown once more for future generations.

But the two are racing against time. The apple trees are a century or more old and are dying. And in other cases, old orchards are being ripped out for farming and development.

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Gillian Flaccus, The Associated Press