Newton's Apple Tree at MIT
United StatesBostonMIT campus, Cambridge
Approximate location.
This is not the tree Newton sat under. It is a living descendant of that one, the apple at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, and it stands in the President's Garden off MIT's Infinite Corridor, where it bears fruit like any other apple tree. MIT's own facts page records it as a gift from Ed Vetter, class of 1942, and gives no planting date. Nobody appears to have written one down. If you know when it went in, tell us. What is documented is the morning somebody came to take a piece of it. In 2009 the Tufts cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin asked the MIT physicist Alan Guth about the tree, MIT's president Susan Hockfield gave her permission, and a Tufts grounds manager drove over and cut three branches off it. Those are now a tree in Medford. An apple cultivar only travels by hand, one graft at a time. The cultivar is worth a sentence. Descendants of the Woolsthorpe tree are 'Flower of Kent' wherever they turn up, a big, coarse cooking apple nobody grows for flavour any more, which is why it is named that way here; MIT's own page does not say so. MIT's Main Group buildings were reported open to the public on weekdays, 6am to 7pm, in December 2022. That was a few years ago and campus rules move, so treat the hours as a good bet rather than a promise.
In bloomIn fruit
September and October, when the apples ripen and drop
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
The President's Garden, off the Infinite Corridor, MIT campus, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MAYou can recognise it by the apples, big coarse 'Flower of Kent' cookers nobody grows for flavour any more. It stands in the President's Garden off the Infinite Corridor, inside MIT's Main Group of buildings.
Free, no ticket. Stands in the President's Garden off the Infinite Corridor, inside MIT's Main Group of buildings, which a December 2022 Cambridge Day news report (citing an MIT provost/EVP communication) says are open to the general public on weekdays, 6am-7pm, as part of MIT's reopened, historically-open-campus policy; this reopening is dated (Dec 2022) and campus access rules can and do change, so treat the exact hours as indicative rather than guaranteed on the day.
MIT campus, Cambridge, MA; MBTA Red Line to Kendall/MIT station, then a short walk across campus (roughly 10-15 minutes to the Infinite Corridor/President's Garden area).
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
