Apples
With 80+ varieties of apple coming from the county, Gloucestershire is rightly famous for its heritage of culinary, dessert and cider apples.
Some cultivars, such as Ashmead’s Kernel (arguably Gloucestershire’s most famous dessert apple), are well-known and widely planted beyond our borders, others are still very rare, limited to just a few specimens. The list of their names is an index of Gloucestershire’s geography, almost one for each letter of the alphabet: Ampney Red, Bedminster Pippin, Cambridge Quoining, Dymock Red, Elmore Pippin. Others have intriguing or mysterious names – Hen’s Turds, Foxwhelp – and others are descriptive of the apple itself – Hard Knock – and one is even named after an opera singer, Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale. Whatever the name and whatever the origin, all these cultivars are valuable, each with a unique sequence of DNA, each with its own provenance, tradition and history. We are committed to conserving this genetic diversity for future generations.
The button below take you to more detailed information about the apples that come from the county, and a map that shows the likely provenance of these cultivars (red pins = cider, green = dessert, yellow = culinary, blue = general purpose). The map and the comments about each apple rely on Charles Martell’s Native Apples of Gloucestershire (2014), part of The Gloucestershire Pomona Series.
Focus on … Foxwhelp
Foxwhelp is an ancient apple, first mentioned In Ralph Austin’s fulsomely titled work A Treatise on Fruit-trees, showing the manner of grafting, setting, pruning, and ordering of them in all respects, published in 1653. Foxwhelp then featured in John Evelyn’s Pomona, published in 1664, also in Robert Hogg’s The Fruit Manual (1884), where the notion that it’s a Herefordshire apple seems to have started. It was and still is widely planted in Herefordshire and its current fame is thanks largely due to Herefordshire’s cider-makers … but it is a Gloucestershire apple!
And what of its name? Charles Martell, in his Native Apples of Gloucestershire (2014), summarises some of the ways in which the name may have arisen; it was found as a gribble, or seedling, close to a fox’s den; a fox-hunter discovered and named it; the eye of the fruit resembles the face of a fox; cider made with Foxwhelp has a distinctive and particular aroma, apparently reminiscent of a fox’s scent. Take your pick.
Dabinett is named after William Dabinett, who first discovered it. Yarlington Mill is named after the mill in Yarlington, where it was first discovered. Harry Masters’ Jersey is named after Harry Masters, the nurseryman who bred it. No such simple explanation attaches itself to Foxwhelp; its name derives from the vernacular, from random happenstance, chance, circumstance and the native wit of Gloucestershire’s citizenry almost 400 years ago. It adds to the mystique.
Adding to the sense of occasion is the fact that Foxwhelp has a well-known tendency to mutate, to produce “sports”. Thus a tree can start to produce fruit from a limb that is subtly different to the “normal” fruit, hence the proliferation of Foxhelps; the original Foxwhelp (now unnecessarily called Old Foxwhelp in some circles), Improved Foxwhelp, Rejuvenated Foxwhelp, Red Foxwhelp, Broxwood Foxwhelp, even Fauxwhelp, apparently. And because of this tendency to evolve naturally, we can’t be totally certain that what we know to be Foxwhelp is exactly the same apple as the Foxwhelp John Evelyn wrote about so glowingly all those years ago. But Single Nucleotide Polymorphism DNA analysis of an array of apples bearing the Foxwhelp name has helped to sort out the Foxwhelp lineage:
- Foxwhelp (aka Old Foxwhelp) is the true, original Foxwhelp, itself probably a grandchild of Caville Rouge;
- Red Foxwhelp is a sport of Foxwhelp;
- Broxwood Foxwhelp and Improved Foxwhelp are both children of Foxwhelp
- Sonoma Foxwhelp is the same as Geneva Foxwhelp, which is also known as Fauxwhelp and is unrelated to the genuine, original Foxwhelp.
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