Remembering Nick Botner: The Man Who Grew Apples

The Battle of the Bulge was winter without mercy.

Snow packed the Ardennes so tightly it swallowed sound. Cold that split skin. Rifles freezing in hands that could no longer feel them. Men sleeping in foxholes that weren’t holes so much as shallow negotiations with death. Flamethrowers turned forests into brief suns—light so bright it erased the trees it touched. Survival came down to inches. Timing. Luck. Whether the man beside you stayed.

Many didn’t make it out.

Almost none made it out unchanged.

Nick Botner did.

Barely.

He carried the war with him for the rest of his life—not as a story he told often, but as a way of moving through the world more slowly than most. After the war he went south, earned his pilot’s license in Florida. Then north—far north—to Alaska in 1948, filing on a 25-acre homestead at Gold Creek while working full time for the Alaska Railroad. Places where winter still mattered. Where survival was earned.

Somewhere along the way—years later, continents removed from the Ardennes—he began collecting apples at his farm in Yoncalla, Oregon.

Not the kind of apples you improve. The kind you remember.

Trees with names that outlived borders. Varieties that carried color deeper than skin. Apples that had survived because someone once decided they were worth carrying forward, even when it made no sense to do so.

Shaking Hands with History

I was building a food forest at my daughter's school on Orcas. Nothing grand. Just trees. A place where kids could learn how food actually arrives in the world. I got in touch with Nick about donating some trees. Got any trees to spare for us? He didn't even have to think about it. Plenty. Come down.

I did. Fast.

By the time I met him in person, Nick was in his early nineties. It was winter again when I arrived at his orchard in Yoncalla. Bare branches. Cold soil. Everything dormant.

I thought I was early. He was already outside, shovel in hand, digging. That can't be him, I thought. It was.

All ninety years of him.

I was quick to join him. We let the work do the introduction for us.

He didn't ask how many trees I needed. Which I wanted. He already had a plan.

Nick Botner in his orchard—choosing trees the way he chose everything else: slowly, by hand, and with a reason.

He chose his favorite trees for us.

Not the most productive. Not the cleanest growers. The ones with a story. He told those stories as we worked—while roots loosened, while soil fell away, while trees were lifted, roots cut, and set gently into sawdust-lined bags. Nothing rushed. Nothing wasted. Each tree came with a name, a place, a memory. Some stories were short. Some took longer than the digging itself.

Around midday his wife called us inside. The house was warm in the way only long-lived houses are. Real ham sandwiches. Homemade wine. Simple food. Earned warmth.

Nick began to talk.

No one interrupted.

Soon he was a kid. He spoke about the Bulge the same way he dug trees—without flourish, without haste. Flamethrowers. Snow. Hunger. Brotherhood. The strange mercy that sometimes appears in the worst places. The cruelty that sometimes answers it. He didn’t frame it. He didn’t explain it. He just remembered.

Lunch stretched. Light shifted. History sat at the table and breathed until we left.

We went back outside.

We dug until evening. The next morning, again. Cold fingers. Careful roots. By the time I left, nearly 300 apple and pear trees lay bare-root in my trailer, dormant and sleeping, bound for Orcas Island. They are all still here, spread around our island.

Back home I built heeling beds. Sawdust. Moisture just right. I tagged every tree—variety, rootstock. Then the spreadsheet. Winter nights. Research. Inventory.

Nick’s trees, heeled in for winter—each one lifted by hand, labeled, and held in sawdust until it could find its next ground. Pendragon, crimson leaves, standing out.

That’s when I began to notice it.

One name kept stopping me. A tree that carried red deeper than flesh. A variety older than most of the places it had passed through. An apple that had survived not because it yielded more—but because someone had chosen it, again and again, against the logic of the moment. Pendragon.

Nick had given the best of what he had. The trees with lineage. The ones he remembered. The ones he loved.

He was already fighting cancer. Before all the trees got in the ground, he was gone.

I chose one tree to remember him by. One that could hold war and winter and generosity in the same body. Something that had no interest in modern convenience. Something that had survived the long way.

I chose Pendragon.

Not because of what it promised—but because it had already endured.

Pendragon - The Philosopher-King (by the Agrarian Sharing Network)

Pendragon lends a legitimately Arthurian aspect to Pacific Northwest apple culture.

A dark red–fleshed ancient English heirloom, the tree itself carries the mark of its fruit—bark, blossom, and even the leaves hold a subtle red cast. It is unmistakably beautiful. The fruit is sweet, clean, and scab-free, suitable for dessert, cooking, and cider alike. A recent scientific study found Pendragon contains higher levels of plant compounds associated with health benefits than other varieties tested alongside it.

And yet—despite all this—it is not commercially available anywhere in the United States.

Pendragon moves hand to hand instead, propagated quietly through the grassroots Agrarian Sharing Network. This feels appropriate. Some things are diminished by scale.

First appearing in recorded history roughly a millennium ago, Pendragon carries one of the most charged names in the English mythic tradition. Pendragon—from the Welsh Pen Ddraig (pronounced thraig)—means “head dragon” or “chief dragon,” a title reserved for supreme leaders of the ancient Britons. It is most famously associated with Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur.

The apple’s provenance deepens the story. Its origins trace to the Cornwall–Wales bioregion, often regarded as the geographic heart of the Camelot legends. Even the word Avalon derives from Old Welsh, meaning Land of Apples. This is not symbolism retrofitted after the fact. It is continuity.

Our own efforts to obtain Pendragon from the United Kingdom—led by a Eugene-based fruit enthusiast of Welsh heritage—were firmly rebuffed. But history has a way of rerouting itself. Not long afterward, we discovered a mature Pendragon tree growing in the extraordinary collection of Nick Botner in Yoncalla, Oregon. Nick graciously shared propagation material, and from that moment forward Pendragon entered the Pacific Northwest in earnest.

Since then, it has spread quietly through orchards and backyards, assuming a near-legendary status among those who grow it. With its deep historical roots, striking physical presence, and blood-red flesh and juice, Pendragon feels less like a cultivar and more like a threshold—a living door standing between the modern orchard and the mythic world that once named it.