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https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20241205-the-apple-library-with-a-lost-world-on-its-limbs>
'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."
Be that as it may, just a handful of apple varieties are grown commercially in
Britain now. "Apple fruit production in the UK is not that big a business,"
explains Ordidge. "We only produce somewhere around 35% of home produce; we
import the rest." Even the apples grown domestically are often of varieties
from elsewhere, like Gala (from New Zealand), Jazz (also New Zealand) and Cameo
(from the USA).
This state of affairs dates to the 1970s and 1980s, when imported apples like
French-grown Golden Delicious stormed the supermarkets. When the dust settled,
most English apples were no longer commercially viable.
However, once orchardists in the UK grew vast quantities of the fruit – at the
end of the 19th Century there were more than 20,000 acres (81 sq km) of apple
orchards in Devon alone – and what's intriguing is that the genes of those
trees, whether they were Duchess of Oldenburg or Cox's Orange Pippin, live on
unchanged in these fields in Kent.'
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
