The Maypop was the inspiration behind the AFFN orchard. “What is a maypop? And do they grow around here?”
Known to the Cherokee as “Ocoee” an entire river valley is named after this edible native plant, presumably for its beauty and flavor. It is also the lesser-known Tennessee State Wildflower, designated as such in 1919 by Tennessee Senate Joint Resolution 13. (The State’s “garden flower” is the more commonly known Bearded Iris.)
As it turns out AFFN is situated in the town of Cleveland, Tennessee, where everything is “Ocoee” – the river, the main street, the high school, the coffee shop, the lake…Not only do they grow around here, literally everything bears their name! The message to us was “Our modern way of life separates of from Nature. We do not see the fruits that grow around us in our landscape, and we have forgotten their names.“
There are currently no named cultivars of maypops, and AFFN hopes to change this. In observing wild maypops, one sees that there are significant variations in fruit size, flavor and color break when ripening, and so, differentiation by cultivar could be useful for growers. The challenges in cultivar differentiation in maypops consist in their extreme tendency to send out sucker roots in all directions. This profusion of roots, which crisscross with neighboring plants, and all of which send up suckers of their own, makes sustaining cultivar differentiation impossible, unless individual root masses are contained. Also, long ivy strands from numerous plants will intertwine, and make it difficult to determine which plant a particular fruit came from, and so it is difficult to identify potential cultivars to begin with. As a long-term project, AFFN is working on practical solutions to resolve these challenges.