The September 2026 issue of the Gather and Sow newsletter is all about apples.

Apples, those iconic harbingers of autumn, are the perfect subject for the conclusion of our summertime interrogation of the rose family (the Rosaceae). If you read our earlier newsletters featuring strawberries, brambles, and stone fruits, then our image (below) of the phylogenetic relationships among important subgroups in the Rosaceae will be familiar to you. Apples are the flagship genus (Malus) of the Maleae tribe (pronounced “mal-ee-ay”). The Maleae also includes pears, quinces, serviceberries, loquats, rowan, medlar, and hawthorns. We will obviously have to return to the Maleae in future newsletters to give all those fabulous fruits their due consideration (In the meantime, revisit Katherine’s beautiful essay “Pear grit and the art of aging”). The fruit structure of all of them is called a pome. We get poetical about pomes in Botany Lab of the Month, where we cut up apples. Before that, we talk about apple evolution in Food for Thought. We conclude, as always, with our roundup of recent media and journal articles in Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen.