Would you Adam and Eve it?
Steven Desmond savours Brogdale’s collection of heritage apples
No fruit is more to our English taste,’ wrote Edward Bunyard in 1929, ‘than the Apple.’ Bunyard’s idea is an appealing one and his spirit is alive and well in the magnificent apple collection at Brogdale Farm, in his own county of Kent. He would be as thrilled as I am to see the well-ordered rows of trees stretching away as far as the eye can see, forming a living museum beyond the reasonable dreams of any enthusiast.
Now that we’ve finally arrived among the foodie nations of the world, we should allow ourselves a moment of quiet satisfaction at the very existence of such a monument to flavour, colour and texture. There is, however, no room for complacency: this place is kept alive through the devotion and determination of a surprisingly small band of knowledgeable enthusiasts.
Chief among these is Joan Morgan, a veritable Queen of Apples and a driving force behind this little world of every kind of the fruit. Her boundless expertise, ceaseless vigilance and cheerful leadership are the best hope for a project dependent on the whims of funding institutions and the goodwill of supporters now that central government has lost interest in such places.
Miss Morgan is the present successor to a long line of champions of this fruit that can be traced back many centuries. In 1533, Richard Harris established a comparable collection for Henry VIII at Teynham, a mere five miles from Brogdale, travelling widely on the Continent to study techniques and bring home desirable cultivars. Despite this promising start, the progress since then has been distinctly uneven.
The age of the modern apple begins with the work of Thomas Andrew Knight, second president of the (Royal) Horticultural Society, whose name is mentioned with honour on the first page of Darwin’s On the Origin
of Species. Knight’s tomb informs us that ‘he possessed a mind capable of investigating the most secret works of Nature’.
He was determined to raise the standard of apple-growing in Britain and gathered a collection of trees at the society’s garden in Chiswick as part of that campaign. That collection was the ancestor of what we now see at Brogdale.
‘Can you name, off the top of your head, a dozen British apples? ’
When the collection was transferred to the society’s new home at Wisley, Surrey, in the 1920s, its arrival coincided with the maturity of our two most eloquent apple admirers, who, between them, ushered in a new level of connoisseurship worthy of any wine bore. We have already met Bunyard, who wrote in The Anatomy of Dessert that ‘there is in the apple a vast range of flavours and textures, and for those who adventure in the realm of taste, a field for much hopeful voyaging’.
His fellow critic Morton Shand, speaking on the BBC in 1944 regarding the dessert apple Ashmead’s Kernel, informed his listeners that ‘its initial Madeira-like mellowness of flavour overlies a deeper honeyed nuttiness, crisply sweet, not sugar-sweet, but with the succulence of a well-devilled marrow bone’. Against the backdrop of the Normandy Landings and the eruption of Vesuvius, his listeners must have marvelled at his unflinching regard for the finer things in life.
In the early 1950s, the whole collection moved to the present site near Faversham, in the east Kent heartland of commercial orchards. Tradition apart, this is just the spot for such a project. Far from the stony heathland of Wisley, the soil here is a deep
if flinty loam with a bedrock of chalk 6ft down. This furnishes the desirable combination of good soil structure, fertility and winter drainage upon which apples thrive and the climate here is ideal for a dessert apple like the universally admired Cox’s Orange Pippin, providing the desired russetfree finish and developing that distinct fondant texture.
Bunyard called it ‘the Château d’yquem of apples’, although it was a little too sweet for his austere palate: ‘a little Mendelssohn goes a long way.’ Despite its fame, Cox is a famously difficult apple to grow well. This is its heartland.
The collection on site is large enough to satisfy the most demanding of apple enthusiasts and it’s necessary to ignore the equally endless rows of pears, cherries, plums, quinces, medlars and all the rest for the purpose of your visit, otherwise, it’s rather like walking into the British Library without knowing which book you have in mind.
A great help in this regard is an expert guide such as Mike Austen, a retired local fruit grower who can explain the broader context and get to grips with the details of how things work here. Under his tutelage, it soon becomes apparent that there are really two apple collections here, the Old and the New, as these are living things that need to be steadily renewed over the generations.
Thus, in one direction stretches the Old Collection, bush trees grafted onto dwarfing rootstocks, with each labelled cultivar allowed two specimens in the long row. The New Collection looks rather different as the trees are trained as pyramids, all for the convenience
of modern harvesting. The soil is kept bare in the row, with mown grass strips in between.
To keep things simple and workable, the trees progress in alphabetical order, so it’s relatively easy to track down the ones you’ve travelled to see.
Among the familiar names, many former classics find a refuge here. Among these is Golden Pippin, bred by Knight himself and now in some danger of being lost. We can go a long way back into history. Here is Decio, the oldest known cultivated apple, whose pedigree extends as far back as the early Middle Ages, perhaps even to AD450. Row upon row of names from the past, all the various codlings, jennetings, beefings and costards, now best known to us from classic plays and novels, stand here waiting for our uncertain approval.
There are, after all, often good reasons why particular apples go out of favour. No such superficial judgement applies here: two trees of each cultivar are grown and propagation wood will always be available for anyone who wants one for themselves, which puts the whole exercise one big step ahead of every glass-case museum in the world.
For all the uniformity of the trees themselves, it is the endless variety of the fruits that impresses. There are eating, cooking and cider apples. There are pale green ones, red-and-yellow striped ones, big ugly ones, some that seem unfeasibly small and many that, although outwardly unpromising, are a source of pleasure to the bite. These are the ones in need of conservation: the well-known apples of the past that have simply gone out of fashion or don’t suit modern commercial requirements.
Of the 2,200 forms grown here, about 500 are of British origin. Can you name, off the top of your head, a dozen? Fashion is a fleeting thing and genetic diversity is easily lost because of it. All the more reason, then, to cherish and visit this precious, beautiful and endlessly fascinating resource. A day of revelation and munching awaits.