In Praise of the Misunderstood Quince (Published 2012) (2024)

AFTER half a century in public life, the most famous quince trees in New York are looking — let’s say mature. Or how about distinguished?

No need to beat around the bush, said Deirdre Larkin, the horticulturist who tends the four beloved quinces at the Cloisters Museum and Gardens, along the Hudson River in Fort Tryon Park.

“They are old, and nothing will change that,” she said. “We have a habit of thinking when you are aged, you might as well be dead and replaced with something new.” Yet in Europe, where the quince’s yellow pome is a culinary treasure, orchardists will buttress the sagging limbs with a crutch. As fixes go, this would seem to be the equivalent of rigging a two-legged dog with training wheels.

But, Ms. Larkin said, “trees can live for hundreds of years.”

“The period of their senescence is the longest period of their life,” she said. “Even though I am aging — I am not going to look the way I looked when I was 30, 40 or 50 — I’m not going to die tomorrow.”

Especially not if Ms. Larkin, who is 61, takes care of herself the way she babies her quince trees. In recent years, she has untangled the girdled roots and sprayed the leaves for protection against the desiccating winds that blow in from New Jersey. And with an arborist, Fran Reidy, she has waged a fierce campaign against another enemy, the apple maggot, deploying a product called Tanglefoot (which sounds like an epithet on “Dancing With the Stars”). Given such diligence, you might think these were not just the most famous but the only quince trees in New York. Not so. Or not quite. A handful of Hudson Valley growers sell quince at the city’s Greenmarkets in October and November. But after a few years of fruitless searching, you may come to the same conclusion that I did last fall: if you want a good quince, you’ll have to grow it yourself.

What most Americans know about quince (Cydonia oblonga) — if they know about quince at all — is that it was once a fixture in Grandma’s garden. O.K., Great-Great-Grandma’s garden. As long ago as 1922, the great New York pomologist U. P. Hedrick rued that “the quince, the ‘golden apple’ of the ancients, once dedicated to deities, and looked upon as the emblem of love and happiness, for centuries the favorite pome, is now neglected and the least esteemed of commonly cultivated tree-fruits.” Almost every Colonial kitchen garden had a quince tree. But there was seldom need for two, said Joseph Postman, the United States Department of Agriculture scientist who curates the quince collection in Corvallis, Ore. Settlers valued quince, above all, as a mother lode of pectin for making preserves. And for that task, a little fruit went a long way.