Beside a blue fence in the back of the East Fourth Street Community Garden in Kensington, a skinny, leafless little tree pokes optimistically up from the Brooklyn soil.

At this point, the sapling looks like not much more than a stick, though a tiny swollen bud at its very top foretells its plans and potential. But to gardener Eric Boucourt, it’s a revolution — a return to New York City of something once precious — and since lost.

The tree is a fall pippin, one of the country’s oldest varieties of apple that’s thought to date back to the 1700s. And it’s one of 40 trees recently planted around New York City as part of a project called the Open Orchard. It aims to restore long-gone fruit trees to the region.

“It's a very special tree,” Boucourt said lovingly, showing pages of research he’d studied on how best to help the little fall pippin grow.

Open Orchard comes from the mind of Sam Van Aken, a botanist and artist who serves as the associate director of the School of Art at Syracuse University. The project was commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island through Governors Island Arts. Van Aken said it will cover an acre and a half of Governors Island with 250 varieties of fruit — all of them either indigenous to, originated in, or historically grown in New York City.

The effort also aims to plant about 100 heirloom trees in gardens around the city by next spring. The distribution to community gardens is in partnership with Green Thumb, the city’s urban gardening program. Most of these historic fruits were once plentiful on the city’s grassy knolls and hills. But they’ve since been mostly lost to climate change and mass agriculture.

The Open Orchard on Governors Island opens to the public on April 29th. Van Aken said visitors will be able to stop by and see, and soon even taste, the fruits that other New Yorkers might have enjoyed centuries ago.

But some agriculture experts said the organizers need to make sure these reintroduced trees don’t themselves become invasive, raising familiar questions about conservation and what it truly means to be a native species.

Click listen to hear about this project, and head to Gothamist for more details about its history.