The Dosch Yellow Bellflower Apple

The oldest living grafted apple tree in the western United States stands at the dead end of a residential court in Hillsdale. That title was given by the Home Orchard Society in 1976, and the Portland State student paper has since called it the oldest apple tree in Oregon. The claim rests on a documented planting date rather than a count of rings: three independent accounts agree it went into the ground around 1850 or 1851, from stock bought at the Luelling and Meek Nursery in Milwaukie, the first nursery on the West Coast to sell grafted fruit trees. That makes it older than the State of Oregon, which joined the union in 1859. Who planted it is less settled. One account credits a pioneer minister who homesteaded the orchard here. The tree's own name, and the Dosch Road and Dosch Park a short way off, point to the Dosch family instead. The sources do not resolve it and this page does not pretend to. If you know which household it was, tell us. The variety is Yellow Bellflower, an old American apple. The city's register measures the tree at nine and a half metres tall, twelve metres across and 2.68 metres round, which for an apple is enormous: most orchard trees are replaced long before a trunk gets anywhere near that. Around it, the pioneer farmland has become streets of houses, and the tree simply stayed where it was put, at the end of one of them.