Is this “The Finest Apple on Earth?”

Have you ever grown an apple tree from seed? It’s one of those things I guess many of us tried as a child but I doubt any of us were even ten per cent  as successful as Mary Ann Brailsford.  

Never heard of her?  You will do when you know the result of her decision to plant some pips of an apple that her mother was preparing for a fruit pie way back in 1809. One germinated and when it was too big for its pot Mary planted it out in her garden.  Seedling apple trees usually take years to produce any fruit, so it grew away happily while she eventually got married and moved away and forgot all about it.

But what she had done although she didn’t know it, was plant the future King of Covent Garden or “The Finest Apple on Earth” according to the man who put it into commercial production.

Mary’s Tree with its then guardian Nancy Harrison

Mary Ann Brailsford (1791-1852) courtesy of Celia Steven

Mary lived in Church Street, Southwell in Nottinghamshire at what was then number 73, and is now number 75. When her mother died in 1837 she and her sister inherited the cottage  which they promptly sold.  It changed hands again in 1846 when it was bought by the butcher from the neighbouring village of Easthorpe. His name will give the game away about the subject of this post , because it was Matthew Bramley.

73and 75 Church Street today from Google maps. Notice the blue plaque next to the door on the right. There’s a photo of it further down the post.

Strangely, however, Matthew Bramley had virtually nothing to do with the fame of the apple that bears his name.

Instead the story of the fame of the Bramley apple really begins eleven years later when another teenager, Henry Merryweather, who worked with his  nurseryman  father, saw the the gardener of Rev Alfred Tatham, one of the canons of  Southwell Minster, carrying a basket of  nice looking apples from the clergyman’s  orchard, which was very close to the Merryweather nursery.

Henry’s 90th birthday was also recorded although not so fully in the  
Nottingham Journal, 25 January 1929

Matthew Bramley (c1795-1871) courtesy of Roger Merryweather

This encounter, which took place in 1856, was recalled by Henry at a public celebration of his 90th birthday in January 1929 and was reported in the local paper the Newark Herald:  “I said ‘What have you got there?’ He said, ‘Bramley’s Apple.’ I said, ‘It looks like a splendid sort.’ And he replied ‘It’s a very good apple.’ I said, ‘Where does it grow?’ And he said, ‘In Mr Bramley’s garden, back of his house.’ I went to look at the tree in full fruit. I had not seen the like of it before. I asked for grafts and he said fetch what you want. I then made enquiries about this apple but could not get to hear that the wonder had got away anywhere. I set to work to get up a stock….”

While Merryweather often gave Bramley the credit for raising the apple he actually knew the fuller story because, as he explained in his 1892 catalogue [not available digitally],  it had been  a chance seedling from a pip sown by Mary who had died in 1852, oblivious of the quality of the apple that grew from her pip and definitely unaware of her part in the development of Britain’s most popular cooking apple.

The Grafter, photograph taken in East Anglia in 1887 by Peter Emerson, V&A

It’s always said that Henry Merryweather was the first to graft this apple but perhaps that’s not absolutely right because while the original tree was growing “In Mr Bramley’s garden,” it sounds as the apples in the basket  might well have been gathered from a tree in the Revd Tatham’s orchard. An article by A. Simmons, deputy secretary of the RHS   in his Horticultural Who was Who in 1948 explained why he thought that might be the case. Merryweather’s nursery ended up expanding and taking over the canon’s orchard where they discovered a tree  which had been top-grafted with Bramley cuttings, obviously several years before.

`Plate 73 of The Herefordshire pomona, by Henry Bull & Robert Hogg, 1876

It’s worth pointing out that historically  most new varieties of apples were such chance finds from plants grown from pips or seeds,  then promoted by nurserymen  using  the term ‘seedling’ to denote their origins.  That’s because apples have a more complex genetic make-up than other fruits, so if, like Mary,  you were to plant a pip there is no chance it will produce a copy of  the fruit you took it from.  Apples require pollinators to take pollen from the flower of one tree to the flower on another, and it’s that crossing that creates the randomness of the result.  Most chance seedlings are worthless but  every so often there’s a surprise – Granny Smith is an almost exact contemporary of Bramley being “found” in 1870 probably from a thrown away apple in the garden of, yes you guessed it,  Maria “Granny” Smith.   Grafting is the only way to secure clones of specific fruit, hence why Merryweather was so keen to collect some from Bramley’s tree.

For more on the story of Granny Smith  see her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

[For more on grafting see these two earlier posts;  Hard Graft and Devastation  and  M9 and the rhizotrons]

The Original Bramley Seedling Tree, painting by F.Gregory. 1965
Image credit: Wisbech & Fenland Museum

Henry did indeed gradually build up a stock of grafted trees which by the early 1860s were producing enough of a crop to sell commercially although only locally. The first recorded sale was recorded in his account book for  31 October 1862. when he sold “three Bramley apples for 2/- to Mr Geo Cooper of Upton Hall”.  By then he had probably been selling grafted trees of Bramley for a few years because in his 1888 catalogue [not available digitally] there is a quote from a local farmer who claimed he had “known this variety for 26 years and planted it extensively”.

William Robinson dedicated a volume of The Garden to Merryweather in 1914

from The florist and pomologist, and suburban gardener, 1884

The Newark Herald report continued: “In due time I sent a peck of 16 apples, 16lbs of Bramley Seedlings to [the RHS gardens at] Chiswick. After the meeting  a friend of mine walked into the Council Room and looking round noticed this apple with no awards. He drew the committee’s attention to it, and they gave it first prize. It has had many since.”

Report of Apple & Pear Conference 1888, from the RHS Journal

That might have been 1876 when Bramley  was exhibited at the RHS show and highly commended by the Fruit Committee.

Things could only get better  and in 1883 it received a first class certificate from the Committee of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition of Apples held in Manchester.

By the turn of the century  Merryweather’s  nursery had three separate sites some distance apart on the edges of Southwell, totalling an estimated 200 acres.

Norwood Park

Painted by John Ralph Starkey at Norwood in 1910 this picture shows the Bramley Seedlings about 10 years old.Image by PresstheStarKey – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

It’s in the 20th century  though that Bramley really takes a hold on the British market, and it’s usually thought that things took off after 1910 when Merryweather’s advice was sought by John Ralph Starkey MP, owner of the nearby Norwood Park estate and it was decided to plant Maythorne Orchard, as  the first commercial orchard of Bramley.  Maythorne is still going in the hands of the same family.

However I noticed an article from The Gardener’s Magazine in 1912 which challenges the idea that Maythorne was first. It states clearly  that the Bramley Nursery, on the opposite side of the road to Merryweather’s Brinkley Nursery ground, on the other side of Southwell  was “an ideal orchard” planted twelve years earlier [ie 1902]  with five and ten year old Bramley Seedling trees which were “about 3feet in girth at the main trunk and have a wonderful spread, the variety being exceptionally free-growing.”

But whichever was first Bramley production boomed.

An exaggerated claim about the age of the tree

from the Facebook page of The Extraordinary John Starkey Bramley Apple Products 

During the Second World War a survey was commissioned of fruit production and it was discovered that there were well over 6 million apple trees of all kinds growing on commercial plantations around England and Wales  and a third of them were Bramley Seedlings.  It remained the apple with the largest acreage and production until 1962 when it was overtaken by Cox’s Orange Pippin but even in  1966 a government fruit census showed there were more than 20,000 acres under Bramley orchards, about a quarter of all apple production. By 2012, like all fruit production, that had declined drastically. With about 4500 acres, it was just marginally more than Cox but still 83,000 tonnes  – approximately 400 million apples. By 2021 production had declined further still with only 18,000 tons of fruit harvested and many growers stopping production altogether, partly because of much cheaper foreign imports, rising labour costs and the difficulty in recruiting pickers. The cartoon probably has it right.

from The Gardener’s Magazine 28th Sept 1912

from The Gardeners’ Magazine 29th Jan 1912

For Merryweather Bramley was not his only successful introduction. He continued to expand his Southwell Nursery which specialised in fruit production and you may have heard of his Merryweather Damson . He also grew a wide range of other trees and shrubs, and was particularly keen on roses which were to become the other mainstay of his business.    Early in his career,  probably about the time of the foundation of the National Rose Society he was introduced to Samuel Reynolds Hole, the great rosarian who was rector of Caunton  as well as one of the society’s founders.  They remained friends until Hole died in 1904. It is roses which feature most in Merryweather’s advertising. 

As for the original tree in Bramley’s garden  it is still soldiering on at the venerable age of about 215, which is pretty impressive for an apple tree since it’s rare for them to even reach 150.  It almost didn’t make it after a great storm blew it over in 1900 but, somehow it survived, propped up by its branches  Two of these grew upwards  from the now horizontal main trunk,  and they have carried on producing both fruit and new growth.

The tree in 2016

Nancy Harrison

For many years  the proud custodian was Nancy Harrison who  grew up next door. Such was her enthusiasm for the tree that when the opportunity arose she bought her neighbour’s house – and the tree – for £500. She was still caring for it into her 90s.

The plaque on Mary’s house

But just as age caught up with her so it caught up with the tree.

Scanned from The Garden, Feb 1991

By the early 1990s Sir John Starkey who still grew Bramley’s commercially on the Norton Park Maythorne nursery got together with Professor Ted Cocking, from the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham to see if the tree could be cloned.  Starkey wanted to do this to “see how they behaved in commercial conditions” and in particular if the apples from these trees taste any different to apples from the grafted trees and if so what is the difference.

Most Bramley apple trees sold in commercial retailers are newer mutations and have a slightly different taste. Nottingham University Food innovation Team put this to the test at the  2017 Bramley Festival.

Scanned from The Garden, Feb 1991

The process of cloning was interesting in itself. Small shoot tips were taken and   treated to eradicate fungal spores and other potential diseases  and then  micro-propagated in laboratory conditions using a liquid nutrient growth medium. When the micro-cuttings had roots about 3cm  long  they were finally transferred to soil and grown on.

Scanned from The Garden, Feb 1991

Since these cloned trees were on their own root systems, rather than being  grafted onto a dwarfing root stock, they grew extremely rapidly, and reached six to eight feet in under two years. `Several hundred trees were produced like this with a dozen being planted in the Millennium Garden on University estate and the rest grown commercially by Starkey. He said when they were first planted “They looked more like tomato plants, little thin spindly things. I thought they are not going to survive in the wild but how wrong I was because in a few years they were outgrowing in dimensions and vigour the trees which I had from my nursery men.”

The Bramley Apple Inn

Bramley Apple window, Southwell Minster
Designed by Helen Whittaker of Barley Studios, York, Image by J.Hannan-Briggs 2014 CC BY-SA 2.0

But the story doesn’t end there.

Indeed it goes from strength to strength.  In 2003 the original Bramley tree was one of fifty great British trees chosen by the Tree Council’s country-wide network of tree wardens, as a special way to mark the Golden Jubilee and to celebrate fifty great years – one for every year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

Then in 2009 a new stained window was created for Southwell Minster featuring the apple as its centrepiece.

In 2011 the town started a Bramley festival which features  cooking demonstrations, apple farm tours, and food vendors who sell Bramley-inspired  food and other items. Nearby there is even a Bramley Apple Inn.

The Bramley apple tree being measured   – image courtesy of Charles Sainsbury-Plaice and Adrian Houston for The Queen’s Green Canopy

The Queen’s Green Canopy chose the Bromley tree as  one of  the network of 70 Ancient Woodland and 70 Ancient Trees across the United Kingdom, to form part of the Ancient Canopy celebrating Her Majesty’s 70 years of service.

In 2018 the cottage  and its neighbour were bought by Nottingham Trent University and turned into graduate accommodation with the rear rooms having a view of the tree. Trent also announced they would sequence the tree’s whole genome.  Julia Davies, head of environmental sciences at the university, said: “Unfortunately, the tree cannot be saved and our work is not able to slow its inevitable decline. It was well cared for previously but the disease had already caused the damage that is resulting in a slow deterioration of the tree. It has lost a number of limbs to the disease and less than half of it still produces leaves and fruit.

Bramley from  the USDA pomological watercolour collection

Lets hope that having survived this long against all the odds Mary’s tree will survive many years more, and that its progeny will keep the King of Covent Garden on the shelves of greengrocers and supermarkets as well in back gardens and allotments for even longer.