Meet the Keswick Ridge farmer growing apples as old as King Louis XIII

Take a stroll through Daryl Hunter's apple orchard and you stroll through history — along an ancient Roman road, through the court of King Louis XIII of France, to the Niagara Peninsula home of Laura Secord, heroine of the War of 1812.

In some places in his orchard, you'll get a lot of this history from a single tree. 

Hunter has 150 varieties of apples, including 100 considered historical and often growing next to each other on different branches of the same tree.

"It's more exercise than collecting stamps," said the 75-year-old.

Hunter began collecting apple varieties when orchards in the apple-rich Keswick Valley were disappearing. More than 200 hectares (500 acres) in the community west of Fredericton were devoted to apple trees in the 1970s. 

Now there are fewer than 40.

Efforts are being made to revive the industry, but even Hunter, who's done so much to preserve the apple varieties of the past, is thinking of giving up soon. He says he's getting old.

Since the '70s, he's collected pieces of trees from around the world. He places a piece of the tree onto the stem, root or branch of another tree, a process called grafting.

"It's kind of like immortality, the tree hasn't died," he said. "It might've died there, but I got a piece off it to keep it going." 

Because the trees are grafted, they produce different types of apples on a single tree. 

Hunter, who has collected pieces of trees from former orchards on Keswick Ridge, said many of the trees from the area are "dead and gone."

"So I'm keeping them alive on my trees," he said.

Hunter is part of the North American Fruit Explorers, a non-profit group that focuses on the discovery and cultivation of varieties of fruits. He has collected pieces of apple trees from across North America and as far away as France.

"The objective I had originally was to try to preserve some of the historic varieties of apples that you can't get anymore," he said.