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Our Fruit Collection | |
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Our Rose Collection | |
Greenmantle Nursery
3010 Ettersburg Road
Garberville CA 95542
(707) 986-7504
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Greenmantle Nursery |
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The Greenmantle / Etter Selections |
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To maximize his chances at success, a fruit breeder should start young and live a long life. Albert Etter did just this, but he still wasn't able to bring his work to completion and safeguard his varietal legacy. When he died in 1950, there seemed to be no one interested in carrying on the work or sorting out all the unfinished business of variety evaluation and selection......
As the years passed, much worthy fruit was probably lost to windstorms, lightning strikes, marauding bears, and itchy cattle. Neglect, while not always benign, was probably not as harmful as misguided attention. Etter's foundation trees - some bearing up to twenty different grafted varieties - could not withstand the onslaught of a pruning crew mainly interested in smokewood. Who knows how many pomological treasures went up in smoke? So now, more than fifty years after Etter's death, almost nothing of his once magnificent apple experiment remains standing........
* * * * * * * * * * Our family entered the picture in the mid-1970's, back when there were still a large number of interesting trees to explore. Over the course of the next two decades, we spent hundreds of hours wandering through the ruins of Etter's lifework, searching for fruit worth saving from oblivion. We managed to "rediscover" several of the original Etter apple introductions: these included Etter's Gold, Katharine, Jonwin, Wickson, and Crimson Gold. But the most exciting part of our exploration turned out to be finding Etter's unnamed trial varieties that were yet to be evaluated.
After many seasons of sampling and collecting, we focused our attention on a small number of exceptional apples that we deemed worthy of naming, propagating, and introducing through our nursery. These GREENMANTLE / ETTER SELECTIONS fall into two general categories: 1. The pink-fleshed apples ( of the same type as Pink Pearl and also derived from seed of the Surprise apple) that we call the Rosetta™ Hybrids and 2. The small confectionary apples of obvious crabapple heritage (along the lines of the Wickson and Crimson Gold type) that we have designated the Sweetmeat™ Crab Hybrids
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Roses: Master List * * * * * * * * * * * * * |
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All original text and images © Greenmantle Nursery 2005 -2021 |
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