Heritage Apples at the Library

 About a dozen people gathered for Ainsleigh Rice's talk on Heritage Apples, which turned out to be a fascinating look at the detective work that researchers have to do to correctly identify the different varieties.

These days, it's possible to get a DNA fingerprint of the apple variety, and the National Fruit Collection has a huge collection of these - but it's still possible to find something that has never been seen by the NFC, and it's also true that mistakes happen, and apples are mis-named or renamed.  One of the four apple varieties Ainsleigh talked about, Brithmawr, turned out to have been renamed by a rival plant nursery as Pride of the Orchard, and the original grower even had a note printed in his catalogues warning of this unethical practice.

The first apple to be featured was Gabalva - which comes from Cardiff (not related to Cabalva across the river from Hay).  The variety was discovered at Aberglasney Hall, and Cardiff Castle is about to replant some trees; the original breeder was the head gardener for the Marquis of Bute, and worked at Cardiff Castle.

Then there was Hitchin's Pippin, or Hedge Apple, Brithmawr and finally the much more complicated story of Egglestone Styre, which presently has two rival claimants for the name, one by way of Tasmania!  After seeing the painstaking way that the evidence was put together for the previous three apples (including tracing a link from Rutland to Crickhowell by way of a Victorian wedding) I'd tend to side with the non-Tasmanian option, which actually has paper records to support it.  The Bulmers sales records had a sale listed to an orchard on the other side of Herefordshire of 52 trees in 1934 - the orchard still exists, and they still have their records which show that they bought 52 trees, and where they planted them.  Unfortunately, they didn't like Egglestone Styre as a cider apple, so they cut off the tops of those trees, and grafted new varieties onto the root stock. 

Apple trees are wierd like that.  It's impossible to grow a variety from seed - just about anything apple shaped would come up - so keeping the variety going is done by grafting scions of the original tree onto root stock.

Fortunately for the investigators, in this case the orchard workers missed some of the original fruiting branches, so the trees that now exist carry fruit of both varieties!  Since one is yellow and the others (one of them was Dabinett) are red, they were easy to tell apart!

All the apples mentioned in the talk were there on the table in front of Ainsleigh.  When I went in to the talk, the apples were just apples.  By the end of the talk, I was amazed that I hadn't noticed all of those Really Obvious Differences between them!

Now is probably a good moment to mention the Marcher Apple Network, which does a lot of good apple related work locally, and only costs £20 a year to join.

Also, Ainsleigh is hosting a walk around his own orchard in Cusop next Sunday, weather permitting, time to be arranged.

This was the first Enchanted Hour that Mary Anne arranged, since the librarian who started it can no longer carry on.  I hope it's the first of many under the 'new management'!