Floods you with fascinating facts: Trees A Crowd reviewed

Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s great mysteries for me. Why, when you plant a pip from one type of apple, does it grow into a completely different type of apple tree? The answer — one kind of apple tree will typically cross-pollinate with another variety to pass on a different set of genes — is less interesting than the next bit. Which is that if you do plant, say, a Braeburn seed, and it takes, you’re likely to end up with crab apples.

The reason, as explained on the podcast, is that the wild crab apple of Britain, Malus sylvestris, and Malus sieversii, an apple native to the mountains of Kazakhstan, are the ancestors of almost all domestic apples we eat today. Give your pedigree pip half a chance and it will attempt to revert. Little wonder crab apples have been credited with magical powers. Historically, lovers threw their pips on the fire and if they sizzled the relationship was hot but if they charred it was doomed. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘roasted crabs hiss’, and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Puck lurks ‘in a gossip’s bowl/ In very likeness of a roasted crab’.

Trees A Crowd is one of those podcasts that floods you with facts which you fear you’ll never remember, but actually do, mainly because you repeat them the moment the episode’s over to whomever’s unfortunate enough to be around. Did you know that the rare Whitebeam of Cheddar Gorge is under threat from goats introduced to the area to keep down the growth of other trees? Or that a considerable proportion of trees in some areas start life in cow pats? Did you know, did you know, did you know?

What makes the podcast so appealing is that there’s no obvious effort to make each episode adhere to a format.