In Britain, a staggering 50 billion apples are eaten a year. But nowadays only about 30% are grown in the UK and increasingly the varieties popular with the growers are non-British varieties, such as the New Zealand Gala. Commercial pressures and the power of the UK supermarket chains have led to this situation, but I am still a big fan of the great British apple. My favourite has to be the Cox’s Orange Pippin. It has a good balance of sweet and tart, with a firm texture. When I go back to the UK, it’s such a treat to have a Cox’s apple, with a large slice of good cheddar cheese!
Apples once shaped the British landscape, with large areas of the countryside being dedicated to apple orchards. But it was British horticulturists that shaped the future of the apple.
Apples are a tricky plant to cultivate. Thousands of years ago, the earliest horticulturists were frustrated. They would find an apple, perfect to eat, but when they planted the seed, what came up next was not the same. It was just as likely to be sour and inedible as it was to taste good. Every pip is genetically different, so it is completely random how the fruit will turn out to be. Sweet and tasty or sour and inedible. Apples are pollinated by insects so half of the genetics comes from one tree and the other half from another tree.
So humans were confronted with a problem, how to ensure the next generation of tree and fruit was exactly the same as the previous one. And the answer was grafting, a method of cloning the original tree. The practice of grafting is thought to go back 5000 years (Romans with grapevines) and to this day every apple tree in commercial cultivation is grafted in exactly the same way. First you need a root stock, which will become the driving force for the plant, the engine. And you need your “scion”, (a descendant, shoot or twig), the variety of plant you want to grow, taken from the parent. All you do is stick the two together with tape and they will naturally fuse together. So now we could clone our favourite apple trees time and time again.
And this is how the uniquely British cooking apple, the Bramley, was born. It was first planted from a pip in a garden in Nottinghamshire more than 200 years ago. Its clones have generated a prosperous industry.
And the world-famous Bramley apple was born.
This tree is living history, a significant contribution to the British fruit industry. It is still living, but scientists are working to kill a fungal disease that is killing the tree.
Every Bramley apple every eaten, every Bramley tree ever grown has come from this one tree.
Like the Bramley, Britain’s most loved dessert apple, the Cox’s Orange Pippin, was a gift from nature. The first tree was grown from a pip by Richard Cox in the 1820s. It produced apples world-renowned for their intense and aromatic flavour.
While nature has thrown up some wonderful varieties of apple, it is human nature that makes us want to try to improve on that, to develop more tasty and economically viable varieties. And it was the British that first discovered how to do it in the Victorian era. The pioneer was Thomas Andrew Knight, later to become president of the Royal Horticultural Society. He believed he could engineer an improved apple. To do it, he played the part of the bee, impregnating the flower of one variety with the pollen of another. After decades of trial and error, the first hybrid apples were born. And this led to a breeding frenzy among the head gardeners of the wealthy stately homes, each desperate to create new varieties of apples that their masters could enjoy and show off to their guests. So competitive was this that many a head gardener was fired for failing to succeed. And it resulted in over 2500 recorded varieties of apple in the UK.
But all was not well in the commercial apple orchards. The most popular variety, the Cox, was temperamental and prone to disease. Often the apples were not good enough to sell. What the industry needed was science and it came from an institution set up in the “garden of England” in Kent, East Malling Research Station. Set up in 1913 by apple growers and the government, it was tasked with scientifically researching apple production and to this day it is a powerhouse in fruit science. Led by Ronald Hatton, scientists started scrutinizing every detail of the apple tree. They dug elaborate observation tunnels with glass windows through which they could record and measure every aspect of the tree’s root system.
And from this meticulous research, they determined the key to a healthy tree is the root system, until then mostly ignored by scientists. So, they selected 16 types of rootstock (Malling 1 to 16), tested them and discovered they each lead to differing sizes of tree, amount of fruit, disease resistance etc. And the winner was Malling 9, or M9, which resulted in a compact tree with good-sized fruit. The M9 was and still is a roaring success. By 1939, 1 million M9 rootstocks had been supplied to growers and the knowledge exported across the world. But East Malling never patented the rootstock and so could not collect royalties each time the M9 was used. Britain could have had a competitive advantage but instead, it strengthened its competitors, and it is believed that 95% of all apples grown in Europe were from trees with M9 roots.
Unfortunately, the next work of the brilliant scientists at East Malling lead to more pressure on the local industry. They found a method of storage that suspended the ripening of the apple, allowing apples from around the world to be shipped into the UK by the shipload. And with the introduction of supermarkets in post-war Britain, consumers loved the new shiny-skinned imported varieties like the Jonathan from North America.
It was a green apple imported from France that consumers fell in love with in the 1970s, the Golden Delicious. They were sweet, looked perfect with shiny skin and uniform size, and were cheap when compared to the British apples. And grown using the M9 rootstock! The French government got behind the product with a large marketing budget for the UK market and created a successful TV commercial campaign, Le Crunch.
The success of the Golden Delicious decimated the local apple growing industry and tens of thousands of apple trees were ripped out of orchards across the country. The supermarkets fell in love with these perfect-looking apples and over the following decades they championed other varieties of apple imported from New Zealand, Australia, South America and elsewhere.
But all is not lost for the great British apple. Despite the supermarkets’ reluctance to truly support British apples, Britain is enjoying a remarkable apple boom, as hundreds of new community orchards revive lost varieties and contribute to a thriving heritage market. Local people are working hard to make British apples available to their communities.
Apple Day celebrates British apples and is held every year on the 21st of October.
My favourite apple-related word: To scrump – to steal fruit (apples) from an orchard or garden.