What garden event  is actually only 36 years old but had already acquired the appearance and  feeling of a long-standing tradition? The answer is, as I’m sure you guessed from the title of this post,  National Apple Day. It was deliberately invented in 1990,  by the arts and environmental charity  Common Ground and takes place every October 21st.

 

The group had been founded in the early 1980s and one of their central ideas was what they called “local distinctiveness”.  That meant more than just conserving famous landscapes or rare wildlife, but instead celebrating and enhancing the ordinary things that give individual places their particular character—local foods, customs, buildings, names, trees and varieties of plants. They have set up a whole range of projects to do this but with  Apple Day Common Ground hoped do something rather different. They aimed to create a new annual calendar custom, rather than revive an existing one, with  Apple Day consciously designed to become a bit of modern folklore…and there’s no doubt they have succeeded.

Why apples you might ask and the answer is simple it’s because Britain possesses [I almost rather ominously wrote possessed ]  an enormous diversity of named cultivars, probably around 6000 in total. Many are associated with particular counties or even individual villages and estates, but they have been rapidly and silently disappearing.

Again the reasons for that is simple. The British grocery market is an oligopoly. Eight retailers control ninety-two per cent of sales. A recent report by the House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee described their power as “behemothic.”  Economies of scale  meant supermarkets largely wanted to deal with the major commercial fruit growers rather than small scale producers. They had the buying power and very quickly and effectively dictated the market, as they do in so many ways.

While taste was obviously one factor in choosing which varieties to stock, it was only one and others became more important: apples had to travel well, keep well and be consistent in size, colour, and appearance, not something. that local varieties could always guarantee. Crucially too apples had to be available all year round.

Until around fifty or sixty years ago apples were a truly seasonal crop. For example early varieties such as Beauty of Bath, a Victorian heritage dessert apple from Somerset are usually ready by early August but they don’t keep well so if you didn’t catch them in the few weeks they were around then you had to wait until the following season.

It’s true that some late season croppers including varieties such as Ashmead’s Kernel can be harvested as late as November or even early December, and under the right conditions will keep through until the spring but even so apples were not available all year round. They were a treat to be looked forward to.

If you look at any 19th century fruit growing manual, such as Robert Thompson’s Gardener’s Assistant, (1859)  you’ll see the techniques to be employed to prolong the season by trying to store apples through the winter. Ideally you need a Fruit House or failing that a cool, well-ventilated room  where the fruit can be arranged  in a single layer on straw over slatted wooden trays or wrapped individually  in newspaper so they do not touch.

  This prevents a single rotting apple from spoiling the whole batch. Even then air must be allowed to circulate and the fruit must still be checked regularly to make sure it hasn’t  gone off. All that is very time and labour intensive and still difficult to guarantee a range of fresh British grown apples all year.

 What happened next ought to be seen as  part of a trend towards erasing seasonality in food.  Britain’s supermarkets began to import apples first from the Antipodes to take advantage of their different cropping season and then more widely because of improved storage methods. Because these imports could be shipped in bulk and as a result were, despite transport costs, cheaper, the entire structure of the apple industry rapidly altered with both growers and sellers concentrating on a very small number of varieties which met all the criteria I outlined above.

As Simon Usborne explained  in The Independent way back  2007  “as  the supermarkets became our greengrocers, so the varieties that I, and many others grew up with in childhood – Blenheim Orange, Egremont Russet, Lord Derby, Worcester Pearmain and countless other local sorts disappeared and were replaced by what he called ” a trio of red, green and yellow things: Mackintosh Red from Canada (dry and characterless), Granny Smith from Australia (too sour), and above all, Golden Delicious from France (bland, insipid.)” and a far cry from the term the French marketing wizards  invented for it about 50 years ago – Le Crunch!

Le Crunch and the rest of these uniform varieties were really only available  because of advances in science in particular Controlled Atmosphere conditions. As earlier generations had long known, ripening of fruit happens faster when it’s warm, so keeping the fruit cool, in a cellar or fruit house helps delay the process.  But the chemical reaction that leads the fruit to ripen is largely driven by  a hormone called ethylene, which speeds up ripening of  the fruit if oxygen is freely available. Researchers  discovered that  if there wasn’t much oxygen in the atmosphere in storage rooms ripening could be drastically slowed down because the ethylene had much less  effect.  Normal atmosphere  is about 21% oxygen but by reducing the oxygen content to as little as 1 or 2%  ripening virtually stops and an apple’s shelf life can be extended by months.

In 1997 the process of halting ripening was virtually eliminated entirely by the creation of a synthetic molecule  called 1-methylcyclopropene which somehow almost blocks the ethylene from working at all, and holds the apple in what is effectively a state of suspended animation  for at least six months.

Great for those who want apples all the year but not so great for any human unfortunate enough to go into one of these facilities without breathing apparatus.  In 2013, two workers on the Earl of Selbourne’s apple farm on Blackmoor Estate in Hampshire were found dead in the controlled atmosphere storage room, and in 2015 the manager who sent them in without that breathing apparatus was convicted of manslaughter.

I say great for those who, unlike me, want apples all year, but there is, of course,  a price to pay.  The apples that come out of these conditions remain essentially as they were when they came off the tree, and they never develop the  applely smells of fresh fruit. But people buy them all the same. Maybe they have never known the smell of an apple picked straight from the tree.

By 1981 these new varieties had taken nearly 50% of the market. While in Britain Cox’s Orange Pippins just about struggled on, and Bramley’s still provided the only available cooking apple, that was about it for traditional varieties. By 2017 we were importing 70% of our apples.  That figure has improved somewhat over the last ten years thanks to the efforts of growers who are represented by the organization British Apples and Pears.  Their latest annual report -for 2025 – has them aiming to reverse these figures, raising the British share to 60% and reducing imports to 40%.

Nevertheless this doesn’t mean there’s much interest in any return to what we are now supposed to call “heritage” varieties.  Of the ten most popular varieties grown in Britain sold in supermarkets only Cox’s Orange Pippin and Bramley have any real “heritage”. The rest are deliberately “commercial” introductions. According to Grocery Trade News in June 2026 “The UK apple market is increasingly split between two very different businesses. On one side are “traditional” commodity varieties such as Royal Gala, Braeburn and Granny Smith, which continue to account for most supermarket volumes and much of Britain’s domestic production. On the other are highly managed “brands” such as Pink Lady®, Jazz™, Kanzi® and Magic Star®, which use licensing systems, controlled supply chains and premium marketing to protect margins and command higher retail prices.”

For more on the Bramley and its history take a look at this earlier post. One day I’ll try and get round to writing about Cox’s too

The low British share of the market  reflects the disappearance since 1950  of  90% of England’s traditional orchards to neglect, development or conversion to intensive modern orchards which contribute a negative impact on biodiversity. Furthermore, 45% of the remaining orchards surveyed in England and 35% of orchards in Wales were found to be in declining condition as a habitat, mainly because of the lack of replacement tree planting, meaning these remaining old orchards will quickly disappear unless action is taken.

Luckily there are signs of hope such as the Orchard Network, a partnership of organisations throughout the British Isles, working together to actively promote the conservation of orchard fruit and nut trees and their varieties, and in their many forms; as individual trees, traditional, garden, and other orchards, and conserve the orchard habitat’s biodiversity.

Common Ground must have seen that coming and their focus on apples brought people’s attention to bear on soemthing that had long been considered an integral sort of the British countrside, garden and diet. Sue Clifford, one of the founders,  said “The environmental movement at the time was all about the special and the rare, and endangered, putting designations around things to protect them – and then the rest could go hang. That seemed completely wrong to us. We wanted to invent a philosophy of wanting to care for everything around you, and create an organisation that would inform and encourage and inspire people to look after their own patches.”

She and her co-founders planning and ecology lecturer Angela King,  and writer and film-maker Roger Deakin saw what the  uniformity of globalised chain stores was doing to our high streets, what mass market housing estates were doing to local vernacular archiuteure and what industrialised agriculture was doing to the landscape.

In a way they were also forwarning us of what TV, social media and the internet would soon be doing to culture more generally. They argued for the preservation of local distinctiveness, whether it’s in local hedgerows,   foods, dialects, songs, customs and a thousand  other individual ways of doing things.

By choosing the apple  Common Ground had found a great  emblem to raise awareness of the loss of so much local identity.  “It was the amazing variety of the fruit, but also the extraordinary richness of symbolism and story attached to it all,” said Clifford. “Other fruits have sublime local distinctiveness too – damsons, walnuts – but the apple just kept coming through to the top.

“Like with Friends of the Earth, at the beginning, the whale was going to stand for the world… well, the apple emerged as the thing that was going to stand for the world for us. What we were trying to do was make the link between nature and culture, and we couldn’t have thought of anything better.”

Common Ground  began work in 1987,  on a campaign to promote the ecological and cultural importance of orchards, and  for orchards to be conserved and planted, and to revive interest in local fruit varieties. Alongside that they commissioned James Ravilious to photograph orchards in the West Country in 1989, and Simon Canetty-Clark to photograph orchards in Kent in 1990. These commissions resulted in two touring exhibitions, and James Ravilious’s photographs were put on display at the first Apple Day in Covent Garden in 1990.

The choice of venue for the first Apple Day  was symbolic.  It was the old Apple Market at Covent Garden, which until 1974 had been home to  the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. There were some  forty stalls, with growers and nurserymen exhibiting and selling unusual varieties alongside cider and apple-juice producers, writers and illustrators. Contemporary recollections suggest that roughly 100 varieties were displayed and available for tasting, and visitors could bring unidentified apples to have them named. The event attracted thousands of people and encouraged Common Ground to build on that success in subsequent years by getting local groups all round the country to hold events.    Sophie Grigson writing in The Independent recalled that first day:  “What a triumph for the British apple and for Common Ground, the charity that set it all up. Growers from all round the country were there, offering a chance to taste the rarer varieties. I sampled with gusto, thrilled by those semi-forgotten names – Peasgood Nonsuch, Ribston Pippin, Tydeman’s Late Orange, Gascoyne’s Scarlet. I came home laden with bags of apples and decided, after much deliberation, that my favourite that year was the Kidd’s Orange Red.”

There is a 2 minute contemporary video of the first day on Vimeo accessible here.

The following year Common Ground published The Apple Source Book and there were about 60 events. Two years later The Independent could already describe Apple Day on 21 October as an established event with fairs and tastings amongst over 600 events around the country. Organisers of events were deliberately encouraged to adapt it to local circumstances, as you’d expect from the underlying philosophy behind Common Ground. After all  a Somerset Apple Day shouldn’t necessarily look like a Kentish or Yorkshire one. To reinforce that in 1993 Common Ground published its Apple Map of Britain, plotting the origins of more than 300 traditional varieties county by county.  In October that year they also managed to get Apple Day raised as a question in the House of Commons with the junior minister Nicholas Soames, replying that ministers had participated in events promoting the English apple season. The ensuing exchange enthusiastically name-checked Blenheim Orange, Egremont Russet, Worcester Pearmain, Cox and several others.

1994 saw the production of  one-off newspaper Apple Broadcast, explicitly combining three things: saving old orchards, creating community orchards and organising Apple Days and the start of Common Grounds   Orchard Observances project, asking people around Britain to record the history, cultivation, varieties and wildlife of their orchards.  It also saw the publishing of Apple Games and Customs which covered  such things as juice pressing, cider making, grafting and pruning demonstrations, apple cookery, orchard tours, longest-peel competitions, apple bobbing, songs, poetry and occasionally revived folk customs such as wassailing.

Even this early  Apple Day was being reported as ” “a fixed part of the autumn calendar.” and by the end of the century Apple Day was really well-established with  National Trust properties, Wildlife Trusts, horticultural societies, museums, schools, local authorities, markets and other organisations were adopting the festival. right across the country.

In 1999  Common Ground and English Nature held a joint conference which resulted in Orchards and Wildlife, making the ecological case for traditional orchards. This matters to the development of Apple Day because its message was widening: the orchard wasn’t merely the repository of historic fruit varieties but a wildlife habitat in its own right.

It was followed in 2000 by The Common Ground Book of Orchards.  Published after more than a decade of campaigning, the book pulled together the conservation, cultural and community strands surrounding the movement with  a positive survival plan for orchards, and places, in which everyone can take part.  Because of these efforts, traditional orchards are now part of the DEFRA Countryside Stewardship grant system and old fruit trees can have tree preservation orders placed upon them. Cornwall, Somerset, Worcestershire and Kent are among the councils now giving grants and advice directly because of Common Ground’s work.  in 2007 Traditional orchards were designated a UK Biodiversity Action Plan Priority Habitat.

Since then there’s been an  absence of big landmarks. Indeed after the 21st Apple Day in 2010 Common Ground decided their creation had become sufficiently embedded in British life to survive without their active support. Exeter University’s account of the Common Ground archive says that the organisation regarded the custom as having effectively “taken root” .  Looking at the range of places and events being held this year I couldn’t agree more.

For more information the best place to start are the websites of The Common Ground website and their archive which is housed at the University of Exeter , contains a significant amount of material created and collected by Common Ground throughout the course of the Apple Day project.For more specifically  on the history if Common Ground see this article by Jos Smith

And just I was finishing this post my copy of the RHS journal The Garden dropped` through my letterbox and in it is a long and very interesting article [much better than mine] by Jane Perrone called Crunch Time.  Well worth seeking out if you’re not an RHS member already.