Those that have followed many of my missives know that they should grab a glass of wine and a comfortable chair - I did not provide the abridged version.
EmpressofIndia could grace us with some images of the 50 year old Apple tree. This would provide some context and reality to the idea of moving such an aged plant successfully.
Also: use of terms is important.
Moving the tree may be difficult and expensive, but most anything can be done with enough resources ($$$) applied. Whether or not the transplanted tree stands much chance of living very long in its new home - ah, that's the rub.
I spent a career working as a horticulturist and landscape manager for thoroughbred horse farms in central Kentucky, where resources were not often a limiting factor. Moving large caliper trees from near and distant nurseries - where these large caliper trees were often prepared by the grower for such moves at large caliper - was pretty commonplace, as the farm owners wanted some big trees next to their new big barns or big houses. Still, there are many challenges to be overcome - even by those that are absolute experts at what they do.
The dimensions of the plant must fit the method of transport. Taking a big old tree down the highway - especially if the branch spread exceeds 8 feet - requires special permits. Tying up (or down) large limber branches reduces some of this concern, but a 50 year old Apple tree is quite likely twice, three times, or more this width for legal travel on a roadway. Yes, you can get a "wide load" permit, but even that has its bounds. Overhead clearance is important as well, since there will be bridges, powerlines, street signals, and other trees that this plant will have to traverse by and through.
Apple trees do not have the easiest branches to bend and secure, especially if they need to be compressed into a tight package. Splitting and breakage should be expected. I spent MANY hours tying up branches of many species of trees - in nurseries, in people's yards, and in the wild - while preparing them for digging and transport. Conifers were pretty much the easiest, as they are genetically predisposed to bending to shed snow in winters. There are many species that are far more brittle, practically breaking as you looked at them. Broadleaf evergreens like American Holly and Southern Magnolia are tough to work with.
Others have noted additional concerns, costs, and contraptions which will likely be required. Depending on the current location of this Apple tree, you may be able to employ a mechanical digging device - which will reduce some effort. More likely, you will have to have significant hand labor with spades and shovels to ball-and-burlap-and wire cage the rootball for this plant. If this tree is indeed 50 years old, and at least 10 inches in caliper, you will want a larger than standard finished rootball rather than smaller. When I was still current in these practices, 10-12 inches of rootball diameter per inch of trunk caliper was a standard -
for nursery grown trees - where growing practices often root pruned or transplanted these trees several times in their lives prior to their final transplant to a client. For a tree that has been growing in one place for this long with no root pruning, well, you should take absolutely as much root zone as you possibly can (and can legally haul down the road) and still pray for divine intervention to help and hope the tree lives.
More issues: what is underground where the Apple tree is currently growing? And what might be underground where the Apple tree is intended to be planted? Utilities often confound projects like this, either needing to be moved out of the way; inadvertently damaged because no one thought to do initial careful exploration; or relocation of the transplant because the utility could not be efficiently moved. This should be a primary consideration at both ends of the project. At one of the farms I worked, despite extensive documentation of very new facilities and preliminary location of subsurface utilities, both a fiber optic line, a primary electrical supply line, and a 10 inch water line were all severed at various times. In each instance, the utility repair far exceeded the tree transplanting cost (not to mention the disturbance to farm operations and site conditions), and with the electric line damage the tree spade operator was lucky not to have been killed.
Ultimately, you will be paying for knowledge, experience, equipment, and time. Someone who knows what they are doing will tell you this, and lay out all the variables and parameters - likely more in your part of the world than in mine. If this tree is crossing state lines, there may be more rules/issues to resolve due to the potential transmission of insects or diseases.
Finally, after successfully moving and replanting this tree, you should expect to carefully maintain this tree's every want and need for at least the next 10 years. It will have been pretty extremely stressed by this disturbance, and regrowing all lost roots just to get back to a stable ability to transport moisture and nutrients through its system will expose this tree to every opportunistic pathogen around - and members of
Rosaceae are prone to many of these even when in the best of health. You may wish to plan for a PHC (plant health care) subscription from a local skilled arborist well-versed in maintaining long life in trees (not a demolition expert who primarily removes plants).
In the really old days of tree transplantation, those clients of means paid nurserymen to dig up fully grown trees bare root, carefully excising roots originating at the trunks all the way out to their fine hair-rooted tips. This was extremely labor intensive, required exquisite timing regarding weather and ground conditions, and employed a lot of sprayed water to keep all the roots moist until they reached their new homes. I work with a fellow in Louisville who still does this from time to time with younger trees (up to 6 inch caliper) to extract them from tight nursery spaces and reinstall them where access restricts use of heavy equipment. See images of a
Cercidiphyllum japonicum 'Amazing Grace' treated this way, circa 2006. They got about an 8 foot diameter spread of roots with this tree.
Here is the plant leaving the growing site:
Here is the tree arriving at the new planting site:
Handled properly by carefully extracting as many roots as possible, keeping them moist the whole time, and replanting carefully in a well-prepared site and providing regular aftercare, this method can be very successful for a wide variety of species. I don't know that you would be successful trying to move a 50 year old Apple tree 400 miles with this method.
So, it is up to you about whether your desire to retain this tree fits within your capacity to expend resources in the effort to preserve it. On the horse farms, the owners were scions of industry or rulers of countries - they had essentially unlimited resources. They also employed quite a few horticulturists to maintain these plantings year round, doing whatever it took. I worked with a crew of 5-10, depending on which farm it was, and we were fully outfitted to do these jobs entirely by hand or with excavators, loaders, and cranes.
Since this response has gone from parable to epistle to gospel, I'll relate one more story which applies.
In 1990, the farm owner I was working for decided he wanted to outfit his 200 year old brick farm office building with a period landscape, including apple trees. While full grown nursery trees were available up to 6 inch caliper, he wanted unpruned "natural" looking trees. So my boss and I set about to find such things. Apple orchards were good candidates, but finding unpruned trees in active fields was not successful. Finding abandoned orchards was the next pursuit, and there we had luck. Several counties away in the foothills of the Appalachians, we came across an orchard where the trees had not been actively pruned in about 5 years and had a suitable habit. The heads were in the 10-15 width range, which could be tied up enough to fit on a trailer to travel down the road. So we set about selecting the best 24 trees, arranging equipment and tools to dig and secure the trees, and schedule the work. As foreman for the operation, I got to do the "test digging". We experimented on a tree that was not one of the select ones.
Conditions were less than optimal. Less than two feet down, I encountered shaley gravelly conditions which would not make for a solid rootball to hold together. So, we expected we would be dealing with a "pancake", meaning a wide rootball (the apple trees in the orchard were mostly 6-8 inch caliper) reaching 7-8 feet in diameter, but only 18-24 inches deep. To safely handle such a shape without having it collapse or fall apart, one had to dig it down on all sides, begin undercutting to maybe a foot all the way around, and then totally secure the exposed rootball with burlap pinned tightly and then wrapped circumferentially with fence wire - which also needed to be twisted to tightly secure the soil within it. The next and most delicate step was to put a ballchain around the secured (but still attached to the ground) rootball. A ballchain might be envisioned as a massive tire chain (northerners who drive regularly on snow/ice know what this is). With this around the circumference of the rootball, lift chains attached to one side of the ballchain were then looped over the forks of a lifting device and tension applied. Slowly, the rest of the undercutting could be performed all while observing the integrity of the rootball. As more and more of the soil rootball was separated from the earth, additional wire support was secured. Awaiting full separation of the rootball was an 8 foot by 8 foot wood platform, made from three layers of 1 x 6 inch oak fence boards nailed together. When the lifted/tilted rootball was separated, the platform was slid beneath the tree's rootball, and the tree was gently laid back upright on the platform. This formed the bottom of a pseudo-box which would contain the rootball during transport. Two 2 x 12 boards were then placed across the top of the rootball, and were bolted to the fenceboard platform with 3/4 inch threaded rods. This tight solid frame was then lifted and loaded onto a flatbed gooseneck trailer, and then tipped on its side and strapped down. Two trees could be transported over the road to the farm in this condition, pulled by a decent 4x4 diesel pickup truck.
Planting these trees entailed the reverse procedure of the digging and loading. Excavate an appropriately sized hole - two to three feet wider all the way around the diameter of the rootball - and no deeper than the rootball if not a couple inches less. Then hoist the boxed tree off the trailer in its tilted position and lower into the planting hole till the box touches down. Then, propped in this position, the lift chains can then be repositioned so that the boxed tree can be lowered toward its proper vertical position a little at a time. Here is where some art and physics come together, as the tree needs to be released from its box and the platform removed from underneath, all without destroying the rootball. Similarly, as much of the fencewire as possible is also cut off and extracted. This is where practice and experience pay off, and to never be in a hurry.
We even planted several of these apple trees inside a dry laid stone fence enclosed yard around the old buildings, where no vehicles could be driven. Like modern day Egyptians, we dug the hole (leaving an inclined ramp of soil to the surrounding surface). Next, we lined up 6 inch irrigation pipe like railroad ties leading to the hole. Then, the lifting equipment hoisted the boxed tree over the dry laid stone fence and set it down on the pipes. Repositioning the equipment on the opposite side of the site, and connecting a long length of cable with a hook on the boxed tree, we pushed and guided while the equipment pulled with the cable till the boxed tree rolled along the irrigation pipes over to the ramp at the hole. There we stopped, and again repositioned the equipment to where the cable would allow the boxed tree to descend the ramp slowly into the hole. Once it reached bottom, another repositioning of the cable would hold the boxed tree at an angle while the ramp of soil was dug out, and then the process of lowering the tree and removing the box/wires/etc. was repeated per usual.
So, it can be done. I have done it, many times, with the help of others and enough resources. All in all, I don't know that I would ever do that for myself because I know where the pitfalls are - and if/when the plant dies, you've expended an awful lot of energy for nothing, essentially.
The advice to propagate this plant through grafting is sound. You can be guaranteed that you can grow out a tree that has the identical genetics of the original, and have many propagules in case one fails. You could still spend a small fortune moving the parent plant, and see what happens if that makes you happy. I think I would find some other way to do something useful with the wood or body of the old tree: make a piece of furniture, or carved bowls, or some such to retain the memory while new young trees are growing and thriving.
