Some Interesting Apples
Something that still blows my mind is that every apple seed produces a new variety. Every single one.
This is a lovely short documentary about a project called Some Interesting Apples, which aims to find apples growing in unusual places (i.e. not commercial orchards but in places where people tend to discard apple cores):
The last three years I have been involved with a project called ‘Some Interesting Apples’, the primary aim of which is to record and, where characteristics make desirable (and sometimes where they don’t), preserve wilding apples, i.e., domestic apples growing on their own roots as the result of a discarded core.
Some of the best apples are then cultivated in an orchard dedicated to wild apples:
The ‘Some Interesting Apples’ project collects apples from wild trees that have been grown using cores thrown away — many from car windows or dropped from walkers and animals.
The wild trees or ‘wildlings’ are trees that grow from those apple cores discarded in hedges and along train tracks, footpaths and roadsides.
Their fruit often goes uneaten or rots — but have now instead be used to create a unique orchard.
The orchard has been developed from dropped fruit from more than 600 apple wildings in Cornwall.
It has now created Wilding Mother Orchard - the first ever orchard in the UK solely dedicated to cultivating wild-grown, chance-seedling apples.
The discovered apple varieties are named for their what3words locations; they have names like Horse Wish Gossip, Panes House Taxi, and Autumn Mushroom Spoke.
Apples are super interesting. I read it years ago now, but I still often think of Michael Pollan’s chapter on apples in The Botany of Desire.
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