By Elisabetta Povoledo / Source: nytimes

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SAN LORENZO DI LERCHI, Italy — There are probably few places as tranquil as the languorous hills that surround Umbria’s Città di Castello. But on her farm, Isabella Dalla Ragione pursues a personal mission — saving ancient fruit trees from extinction — with a strong sense of urgency.

Rescuing vanishing varieties is a race, she says, “and lots of times we arrived late.”

“If a plant dies, basta, it’s finished,” she adds. “You can’t preserve it.”

In that race, she picked up the baton at a young age from her father, Livio Dalla Ragione, who began scouring the surrounding countryside decades ago, searching for neglected fruit trees that no longer satisfied changing agricultural trends, market demands and modern tastes.

He collected branches with fresh buds and grafted them onto rootstock to create an orchard of endangered cherries, figs, apples, pears, peaches, quinces and other sundry species in a farmyard belonging to an abandoned church that he had bought in 1960.

Ms. Dalla Ragione, 59, began tagging along as a child, studied agronomy at a university to bring technical knowledge to their enterprise and, after her father died in 2007, continued to maintain the orchard.

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They called their collection of old fruit varieties “arboreal archaeology.”

“When he started, people didn’t speak of biodiversity or genetic erosion,” Ms. Dalla Ragione said, even though the loss of varieties was already a documented fact.

Fruit farming treatises at the beginning of the 19th century noted about 100 varieties of apples. One hundred years later, the number had declined to around 50, and today, three varieties make up 80 percent of production in Italy, she said.

“In this historic moment, diversity is seen as a defect. In this moment, people seek homogeneity,” she said of a market-driven momentum to get fruits to adhere to a specific aesthetic. “In the United States, if an apple isn’t crunchy, it’s not even considered. It doesn’t matter if it has no flavor as long as it’s crunchy.”

Ms. Dalla Ragione’s initiative to preserve dwindling varieties is not unique in Italy, but San Lorenzo and its surroundings have provided an especially vital trove of diversity.

The Upper Tiber Valley was for centuries a crossroads of travelers and pilgrims, “a place of arrivals and departures and exchanges, and like all areas of passage, the biodiversity is extraordinary,” Ms. Dalla Ragione said.

To find and collect their forgotten varieties, for decades she and her father chatted up farmers and motley locals in the Umbrian and Tuscan countryside. They gathered branches, and with them the traditions and chronicles tied to the fruits.

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