The ‘apple library’ with a lost world on its limbs

The explosion of crisp, commercial apple varieties in the last century doomed many other breeds into obscurity. But in a field in Kent in the UK, some of them live on.

A few miles from the sea in Kent in the south of England, hedges of hazel, ivy and briar stand like ramparts separating kingdoms of fruit.
In one field are quinces, dense as golden anvils. Nearby are grey medlars, hard and sour. Pears gleam through red leaves. But the real stars are the apples – more than 4,000 trees, of more than 2,000 varieties. Their fruit clusters along wand-like branches and carpets the ground in a fragrant layer of softly rotting flesh. They smell of a thousand warm afternoons spent snacking in a hammock or up a tree. I kneel under the branches of a particularly laden tree to find the label with the name. It reads, aptly: “Weight.”
This is the United Kingdom’s National Fruit Collection, a living repository of apples once grown in the British Isles, as well as other fruit. It is not the only apple library out there. The USDA’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York, and New Zealand’s Plant & Food Research’s collection, among others, host thousands of apple varieties.
But unlike those collections, which include wild relatives of apples, collected in Kazakhstan or on salty beaches in Alaska, to aid apple breeders in search of new traits, this collection is a record of the British love affair with the fruit. “There’s a history of apple production here,” says Matthew Ordidge, a senior research fellow at the University of Reading near London and the nation’s curator of apples. In the lively café at the collection at Brogdale Farms in Faversham in Kent, he recalls a proclamation made a 100 years ago by apple enthusiast Edward Bunyard: “No fruit is more to our English taste than the apple.”