Happy Apple Day

What’s the story?

APPLE Day falls a week today, on October 21. The event was established in 1990 by the Dorset-based conservation and environmental charity Common Ground.

After nearly two decades, the charity says, Apple Day has succeeded in raising awareness of the importance not just of orchards to our landscape and culture, but also in the provenance and traceability of food. It’s also one reason behind the growth of farmers’ markets.

Says Common Ground: “We have used the apple as a symbol of what is being lost in many aspects of our lives and shown that anyone can take positive action towards change.”

The Day is being keenly followed in Scotland, where painstaking efforts have been made to reverse the decline of Scottish orchards, and the loss of old varieties of apple.

John Hancox is chairman and co-founder of Scottish Orchards, a voluntary group that supplies fruit trees and offers training and advice to anyone keen to develop orchards in Scotland. It has been staging Open Orchards events since 2015 and has supplied hundreds of orchards to schools and many others to community groups and individuals. He also owns Scottish Fruit Trees, a company based in Glasgow.

Hancox says: “I’ve developed a specialist business supplying the old heritage varieties of apples, and have been encouraging people to plant these old varieties.

“There are quite a number of these, which date back a long way. You can find them in different areas. The Arbroath Pippin, for example, goes back several hundred years and is thought to have originated at the abbey there. It’s the same with others areas – there’s a White Melrose and a Galloway Pippin.

“Perthshire has the wonderfullyllynamed Bloody Ploughman, which ch has a bright red apple. It has a slightly dubious story about it, , springing from t he body of a ploughman who had been shot by an angry ghillie or something like that.” He adds with a laugh: “I’m not sure

I completely buy that ... but it is a very attractive apple.

“The old heritage apples tend d to do quite well in their locality, which hich is why they’ve been grown in these ese areas for a long time. And people le like the fact there’s a long history to these apples.”