Family tree
In Britain we have a wild apple – the crab apple – but it is not the grizzled grandparent of the lush apples we eat. Various researchers (notably in English, Barrie Juniper, 2006) have traced the forbear of our apple to the Tien Shan – the Mountains of Heaven. This huge range sits where now China and Kazakhstan meet and in its deep cut valleys fruit forests thrive. It is thought that bears and other animals enjoying the sweeter apples would eat and then excrete at some distance, the pips then growing on. So the tendency towards sweetness would be genetically favoured. Horses and people travelling along what became the Silk Roads likewise enjoyed the fruit and would excrete or throw out the pips along the braided ways from China to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Perhaps they brought and traded some particularly tasty fruit and trees, or offered apples that kept well into the spring. Certainly the apple made it to Britain in Roman times, perhaps before.
Apples are not the same, in fact they experiment prolifically since every pip in every apple offers the chance of a new variety.
The apple trees you glimpse along railway lines and road verges carry on the tradition of the journeying fruit – they have probably grown from the cast out apple cores. Some may well be delicious and worthy of attention, but it takes a process of development and introducing a variety to the Royal Horticultural Society to get it recognised as a discrete new entity. Potentially every tree is different but if we like something about a variety we have a means of perpetuating it - by grafting. A carefully cut twig from the variety of choice is inserted onto a rootstock or another tree. Another means is by vegetative reproduction - if a tree falls but retains some roots in the ground it may grow up again vertically from the crown and over hundreds of years spread outwards keeping the variety going. Some varieties will grow if carefully tended to develop their own roots.
It seems that the Babylonians were grafting 3,800 years ago, and by the first century BCE Virgil described the process in his practical poetry called The Georgics encouraging farmers to learn this skill [Trees be Company 1989]. There is an apple called the Court Pendu Plat which is thought to have been brought here by the Romans. Imagine 2,000 years of grafting, how many generations of people learned the skills, if an apple tree lives to be 120 – 150 years old how many tree generations have there been in England?
So perpetuating an apple variety demands a relationship between people and tree – clever people, clever tree.
Local soil, prevailing weather and the experiments of generations of growers and gardeners have resulted in thousands of varieties of orchard fruit. Over the years these varieties have passed in and out of favour and orchards containing many of them have been lost. Yet there are still local varieties surviving in old orchards and in gardens. Some varieties are so suited to local conditions that they grow best close to where they were raised. This is a form of biodiversity, it is valuable in itself and also as a genetic store to enable new varieties with particular qualities to be developed, but it should be celebrated as much for its cultural significance. Every variety has a story – perhaps it was found growing in a wood or even in a thatch roof, perhaps someone struggled long and hard to cross known varieties to achieve a good keeper or an elegant flavour.
The names of orchard fruits may tell us something of their origin - Dittisham Ploughman, Keswick Codlin, Norfolk Biffin; or their creator - Laxton's Superb, Cox’s Orange Pippin; or their qualities - May Queen, an apple which is picked in October but develops its richness during storage and is at its best the following spring. Fruit varieties help enhance the local distinctiveness of a place, linking history, horticulture and cookery. It is not only orchards which hold this reservoir of information, many gardens contain old fruit trees, some being remnants of orchards which once stood on the land. The owners of many of these trees may have no idea what they are or how important they may be.
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