Yellow Bellflower Apple

The ‘Yellow Bellflower' was always called ‘Belle Fleur' by the French because of its beauty in blossom. This large, handsome, winter apple was a favorite for making pies. Its smooth pale lemon-yellow fruit, sometimes reluctant to fall, lingered even when the first flurries of winter left the tree bare of leaves and progeny exposed to birds and animals and children.
With each advance of civilization on our continent the ‘Yellow Bellflower' readily found a home, for the apple grew up with the pioneer and grew old with the pioneer. The apple arrived in the Oregon Country by a strange mode of transportation, at a time when the native hostility was at its highest. It fell to Henderson Luelling and William Meek of Iowa to begin a westward trek of nursery wagons with the first introduced grafted, standard-fruit varieties into the West. It was said that one of the grafted trees was a "Yellow Bellflower", that reached Oregon in 1847.