I remember the solemn quiet that reigned in my little orchard during those days when no commercial planes were allowed to fly. The peace was profound in contrast to the war that loomed on the horizon. On the day that American planes began dropping bombs on Afghanistan, we were at a neighbor's orchard. They were hosting a "Cider Bash."

Tarps were laid out under the trees and the trees were shaken; the fruit fell to the earth and the children screamed and giggled and ran away to avoid getting pummeled. Later, when all the apples were fed to the press and the clear, amber cider flowed like honey against a backdrop of city, sea and sky, we unpacked our picnic lunches on the grass and drank the cider in great quaffs. The cider was sweet but it had a bracing, bitter edge, and though the occasion was festive, some of us quietly mourned what was happening in the dark of night, on the other side of the globe.

Within a week or two of the cider bash, Gwenyth Bassetti, the founder of Grand Central Bakery, sent me a box of apples from her orchard near Goldendale, in south central Washington. "We call them Big Bumpies," she said. The name was fitting. Each apple, no two shaped quite the same, weighed in at well over a pound, and the scent they gave off made me weak in the knees. They were green and red and wonderfully misshapen. I fell in love with them at once.

Like the apples at my house, and like a lot of backyard fruit for that matter, Bassetti's Big Bumpies are of vague origins. They were discovered at the boyhood home of Gwen's husband, architect Fred Bassetti, in a town that used to be known as Forester and is now part of Tukwila.

"My father bought a piece of land there in 1918, one year after I was born," says Fred. "Another house had been there before, but it had burned down. Still, there was a garden there and a little orchard. We had Gravensteins and Yellow Transparents and these big, bumpy apples that ripened late. No one knew what they were, but they're sweet apples and crisp, and we loved them. I used to give scions, or cuttings, to friends all the time who wanted to grow this apple for themselves." In the 1950s, a friend of Bassetti's persuaded him to take cuttings and start a small orchard of Big Bumpies. "In 1992, we took some scions from his trees and started about 80 trees of our own; and a couple years after that, we planted another 40."

Most apple trees are grown in more or less the same way. Since apples do not grow true from seed, orchardists take scions from trees that bear good fruit and graft the branches onto reliable rootstock. The apples borne on these trees are virtual clones of the trees from which they were taken. The technique has its advantages. In an orchard where all the trees are the same, all the fruit ripens and can be harvested at once.

A field of wild apples, each grown from seed, would present serious challenges to a farmer. Bitter, hard, mealy or bland, most of these apples would be, to most people, good for nothing. They would bear little resemblance to the varieties that have been carefully cloned for hundreds, even thousands, of years. But fields full of identical apple trees bearing sweet fruit are not the utopian dream they might appear to be, either.

In "The Botany of Desire," Michael Pollan addresses the lack of diversity in modern apple farming. Growing a dwindling handful of varieties in vast orchards has rendered the apple less fit as a plant and requiring more pesticide than any other food crop, he says. Apples and their predators evolve side by side; the apples that have some resistance to pests survive and the pests that have some way to overcome the resistance survive to give them fits. Apples that are particularly pretty or sweet have the advantage of attracting protectors like us. But even though it may seem that we have settled into a comfortable rut of planting only a dozen or so varieties, and preserving them with sprays, new varieties are emerging all the time.

Some new apples come from a deliberate effort by growers to cross varieties with desirable characteristics; others are fortuitous accidents. Fuji, one of the most successful new varieties in decades, was bred more deliberately at a Japanese research station, where growers crossed two old American varieties, the Red Delicious and Ralls Janet, a favorite of Thomas Jefferson.

Sometimes an apple falls to the ground, one of its seeds takes root and, somehow, it doesn't get mowed down or pulled out. The Red Delicious started out that way. Originally known as the Hawkeye, it sprang up on the farm of one Jesse Hiatt in Peru, Iowa, and was on the market by 1874. Cameo, a new apple that's something of a darling among Washington growers, originated from a chance seedling in the Wenatchee River Valley.

This year, my apples are not bearing as much fruit as last year, and neither are the Big Bumpies. "We hardly have any fruit on the trees at all," says Bassetti, "but apples are notorious for having good years and bad years."

So, as it turns out, are we.