Apples for our eyes

Apple Day, on 21 October, is a newish festival, created in 1990, by the venerable organisation, Common Ground. Intended to be a celebration of the apple, its purpose is also to raise awareness of the importance of apples in landscape, ecology and culture. All over the country there will be many revels where you can taste apple varieties, jellies, chutneys and drinks; try apple-bobbing, take apples from your own garden for identification by experts, buy apple trees and all sorts.

These are charming festivities, much better behaved than the ancient cider-makers’ ritual, wassailing. I have never taken part in the wassail, but from a description in Pete Brown’s The Apple Orchard, it sounds like a chaotic romp in the January night-time during which orchardists, villagers and guests sing old rhymes (badly), whack the apple trees to get them in fertile mode then get plastered on the new season’s cider.

There is much more than wassailing in Brown’s book which, like the efforts of Common Ground, wants us to care more about this fruit that we take for granted. ‘Like air or water or beer, it’s so much part of the everyday, we forget how special it is,’ says Brown. And apples are extraordinary for reasons that are manifold. The first is obvious. The apple tree provides a great source of nutrition at very little cost — to us, I should add, because the orchardist is one of the hardest working farmers, operating at very little profit.

Apples are remarkable fruits because humans have made them that way. If you have an apple tree you will know that if you leave the tree alone it will ultimately fail to produce fruit of good size and appearance and that is why over the centuries people have gone to extraordinary lengths to discover how best to graft the plants, prune the trees, assist pollination, thin the budding young fruit, and then protect it from pests and fungus while it ripens.