Have you any unusual apple trees in your garden?

With names such as the Hens' Turds apple and the Bloody illegitimate child pear it is perhaps little wonder that ancient varieties of British fruit are struggling to survive.

But a rescue project by the Environment Agency is saving some of the more colourful elements of our fruit-growing heritage from extinction.

Some names verge on poetry - Gilliflower of Gloucester, a dessert apple found in the Saul area; Port Wine Pippin and Arlingham Schoolboys, named after a village whose last tree died in the late 1990s.

Other varieties, however, owe their names to rather saltier language.

The Shit Smock plum derives its sobriquet from the unpleasant after-effects of over-indulging on the small, green fruit.

Scarcely more appealing are the Hens' Turds or the Bloody illegitimate child, the origins of which been lost in the mists of time.

All these apples are deemed to be critically endangered, growing in fewer than 10 sites.

 

Kindred I have one which i have called a few names, (unprintable on the forum):WINK1:.
as the ( BLEEP) only produced 6 apples this year .

 

Music,

I had 8 apple trees who's branches used to bend to the ground with the weight of the apples: I used to put a ring of farmyard manure around them each year, about 6 inches away from their trunks.

It worked for me. The only trouble was that my neighbours eventually got fed up of me leaving bags of apples at their back door. They'd plead with me that they didn't "want any more apples this year!" However, in the last couple of years that I had the "orchard", the "problem" was resolved by crows, who removed the crop before it was ripe.

The trees are gone now. There's a pond there instead.