The ones you listed have great taste (from my store-bought perspective) but because Washington State is awash with apples, familiarity has dulled my desire. Here people can’t give apples away!
The Golden Sentinel escaped the apple axe - so it passed a certain taste threshold - but I can’t describe exactly what that is - probably not boring!
I would just say it’s important to be aware that their natural growth habit is more accurately described as “candelabra” rather than “columnar”.
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Oh really? So a natural espalier shape?
No. The branches that end up growing out turn upright like the main trunk. It forms a three dimensional candelabra; not flat like espalier unless you prune it to be flat.
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Oh I see. The individual branches have that ‘straight out and bend up’ shape of a candelabra, but the whole tree together is not flat like espalier. Thanks, I appreciate the clarification.
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Here’s a picture to demonstrate the candelabra habit that can develop if not pruned to force it to remain a single column. I actually prefer this because it still remains very compact, but can produce far more than if pruned to a single trunk.
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Thank you, really appreciate that. It helps understand better.
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Have you raised Obelisk? Tasted. (I’ve not).
I have not tried it (nor have I seen it for sale).
Red fleshed, or so I’ve been told.
‘Obelisk’ is listed as white fleshed on Pomiferous.com. None of its recorded ancestors are red fleshed either; (‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ x ‘Court Pendu Plat’) x ‘Wijcik Spur McIntosh’ = ‘Obelisk’
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Thanks…guess I’ve been misinformed along the line someplace.
I’d actually love to try crossing one of my columnar apples with ‘Pendragon’ (redfleshed) and ‘Hunt’s Russet’. I had potentially made a successful cross this year, but deer got the fruit before it was mature.
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I don’t have it, but Maypole is a columnar red flesh one. SkillCult in Calif. is breeding to it.
I’m trying to cross several red flesh and other apples. So far, some seeds to plant and a couple little seedlings are about all I have. But, looks like a number of grafted cultivars may bloom first time this year to use in crosses.
‘Maypole’ is a tart redfleshed crabapple. I’d like a columnar redfleshed dessert apple. 
If you decide to work with columnar genetics for your crosses any random colomnar apple should produce about 50% columnar offspring when crossed with any non-columnar apple. The columnar gene is dominant so it only needs to be inherited from one parent. Most existing columnar cultivars are the result of a columnar crossed with a non-columnar, but if one were to get a hold of a columnar tree that carries two copies of the columnar gene (homozygous) then it could potentially produce 100% columnar offspring regardless of what it’s crossed with.
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Sounds very interesting. I’ll probably let you do those columnar crosses to get a dessert columnar apple / red flesh. I’m too invested in 40 red fleshed and 100 other apples, giving me 4000 cross possibilities, times up to 8 or more seeds per one apple crossed.
There’s room for more than one person doing this sort of thing!
BB
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I hope to get Mere Pippin going this year. From Nigel Deacon’s description & preliminary photo it appears to be a columnar tree. Or it has the potential habit if pruned accordingly.
Skillcult had something to do with its introduction to the States & is my scion source. He seeks (from what I gather in his taste tests on YouTube) something that hangs onto the tree long after ripening & likable eaten from the tree. Mere doesn’t seem to have that feature. Nigel wrote me to say he waits until March before eating any, after he has run through the others that cannot keep as long. By then it is no longer terribly hard (like Gold Rush, maybe) and not so sharp. Sounds good to me, so I hope to get a graft or two going.
In the meantime, my son-in-law wants to grow two columnar apples. Some of the catalog descriptions say 8 or 9 feet tall, even on MM106. They sound like semi-dwarf at best for size. Is that your (you all’s) experience?
Also, to re-state the questions at the top of this thread, any strengths or downsides I should pass on to him, besides the tutorial for pruning it to grow upward?
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That sounds like an apple worth trying! Neither COP or CPP are candidates for growing in my neck of the woods, but Wijcik McIntosh was found north of me in British Columbia, if memory serves.
I saw an old columnar specimen in a Seattle yard that had grown quite large with many branches. Still it was probably more compact than the average unpruned apple of similar age.
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