Queens' modern-day Johnny Appleseed

Flushing native Erik Baard is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed.

Baard has planted apple tree saplings in parks across the city for the past three years in hopes of restoring New York's apple orchards.

Baard, a writer and founder of the Long Island City Boat House, is changing course this year. He is planting 150 saplings of Malus sieversii -- the original ancestor of all great American apple cultivars -- on Randall's Island.

"My feeling was that I had to plant this heirloom apple and return apples to [their] historical place in New York," said Baard, 43.

The Malus sieversii apple is greenish red and grows wild in its native habitat, Central Asia forests, where it was endangered about 15 years ago by development in Kazakhstan, Baard said.

"The Malus sieversii are the ancestors of all the apples we love today," Baard said. "They go back to Kazakhstan -- the homeland of the apple," which was brought to the Americas by Western Europeans.

North America's native apple is the crabapple, "a non-dessert apple," said Baard, who taught himself about the fruit's origin after learning that apple orchards once flourished in Queens -- particularly in Elmhurst -- 300 years ago with the Newtown Pippin green apple.

"The Newtown Pippin apple was a delicacy and a favorite of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson," Baard said. "Benjamin Franklin brought the apple back to England with him."

Baard learned that apple orchards once thrived along Newtown Creek on the Brooklyn-Queens border -- today the city's most polluted waterway and earmarked as a Superfund site.

"Here I am a native of Flushing -- went to school here and never was I taught that Queens and Long Island were known for [their] delicious apples," Baard said.

"The apple is part of New York's identity," Baard said. He helped form the Friends of Randall's Island Orchard, whose members planted the saplings that will grow without pruning or spraying.

"People get excited when they plant a tree," he said. "It's very satisfying. It's good for the soul to plant trees."

Like Johnny Appleseed, he said, he seeks to bring apple orchards to the underserved.

Surrounding Randall's Island are three housing projects -- in East Harlem, the South Bronx and Long Island City.

"This orchard on Randall's Island is accessible by walking over a bridge from all these neighborhoods," Baard said. "Children and their families can walk over there, have a picnic and pick apples -- it will belong to them."

Bob Din, 58, of Astoria, helped a group of East Harlem schoolchildren plant the saplings on Randall's Island this week.

"It was a gratifying experience to work with the kids and get our hands in the soil," Din said. "They really enjoyed it, and, like Erik said, in the spring and summer they can come back and see what they grew and pick an apple."

Baard said the apple tastes "sweet and nutty -- even lemony."