6 0
July-August 2018
I
FEEL ALMOST shy about writing this column. It
contains no revelations, no call to arms. No one
gets savaged: well, only mildly. The subject is
almost inconsequential. Yet it has become an
obsession which, at this time of year, forbids me
to concentrate for long on anything else.
Though we still subsist largely on junk, even bilious
old gits like me are forced to admit that the quality
and variety of most types of food sold in Britain has
improved. But one kind has deteriorated. You can buy
mangoes, papayas, custard apples, persimmons,
pomegranates, mangosteens, lychees, rambutans and
god knows what else. But almost all the fruit sold
here now seems to taste the same: either rock hard
and dry or wet and bland. A mango may be ambrosia
in India; it tastes like soggy toilet paper in the UK.
And the variety of native fruits on sale is smaller than
it has been for 200 years.
Why? Most people believe it’s because the super-
markets select for appearance not taste. This might
be true for vegetables, but for fruit it’s evidently
wrong. Green mangoes, Conference pears, unripe
Bramley, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious apples
look about as appealing as a shrink-wrapped stool.
Appearance has nothing to do with it. What counts to
the retailer is how well the variety travels.
Take the Egremont Russet, for example. It’s a small
apple that looks like a conker wrapped in sandpaper.
But it has one inestimable quality. It can be dropped
from the top of Canary Wharf, smash a kerbstone and
come to no harm. This means it can be trucked from
an orchard at Land’s End to a packing plant in John
O’Groats, via Sydney, Washington and Vladivostock,
then back to a superstore in Penzance (this is the pre-
ferred route for most of the fruit sold in the UK) and
remain fit for sale. The supermarkets must have had
some trouble shifting it because of its strange
appearance, so they promoted it as a connoisseur’s
apple. Such is our suggestibility that almost ever yone
believes this, though a dispassionate tasting would
show you that it’s as sweet and juicy as a box of
Kleenex.
For the same reason, we are assaulted with Confer-
ence pears, most of which resemble some kind of
heavy ordnance, rather than any one of a hundred
exquisite varieties such as the Durondeau, Belle Julie,
Urbaniste, Glou Morceau, Ambrosia, Professeur du
Breuil or Althorp Crasanne. It is because these pears
are so delicious that they cannot be marketed. They
melt in the mouth, which means they would also melt
in the truck before it left the farm gate. As the best
pears, plums, peaches and cherries are those which
go soft and juicy when ripe, the grocers ensure that
we never eat them.
To compound the problem, the supermarkets
demand that fruit is picked long before it ripens: it
doesn’t sof ten until it rots. This makes great commer-
cial sense. It also ensures that no one in his right mind
would want to eat it. But, happily for the retailers, we
have forgotten what fruit should taste like. The only
way to find out is either to travel abroad or (the low-
carbon option) to grow your own. I find myself
becoming a fruit evangelist, a fructivist, whose mis-
sion is to show people what they are missing.
When I lived in Oxford, at a time when allotments
were underused, I spent a week in the Bodleian librar y
reading Hogg and Bull’s
Herefordshire Pomona
, a
massive book about apples and pears, written in the
A mango may be ambrosia in
India; it tastes like soggy toilet
paper in the UK
Shops focus
not on quality
or even
appearance
but on
varieties that
travel, so grow
your own
The best fruit
doesn’t travel
by George Monbiot
ENVIRONMENT
July-August 2018
6 1
1870s (you can now buy it on CD from the Marcher
Apple Network). Then I cleared two and a half plots
and planted the best varieties I could find. I lef t just
as the trees were ready to fruit. But land here in mid-
Wales is cheap. I bought half an acre and have star ted
planting a second orchard.
When I first tried to place an order, I caused great
excitement among the nurseries I phoned. Where had
I seen these apples? Who recommended them? Two of
them, I discovered, had been
extinct for at least 50 years. So
I have had to settle for second
best, by which I mean breeds
which still exist. I began by
planting a Ribston Pippin and
an Ashmead’s Kernel. These
apples, both exquisite when fully ripe, can be stored
from October till May. To spread the fruit as f ar through
the year as possible, I have ordered an apple called
the Irish Peach, which ripens in early August; a St
Edmund’s Pippin (September) and a Wyken Pippin
(December to April).
After a long search I think I have pinned down the
apple I once tasted and loved in a friend’s garden. I’m
pretty confident that it was a Forfar, also know as
the Dutch Mignonne, so I’ve bought one of those
too. If I’d had more space, I would also have planted
a Catshead, a Boston Russet, a Sturmer Pippin and
a Reinette Grise.
I have bought two pears – a Seckle and a Beurre
Rance – a green plum (the Cambridge Gage), a fig, a
medlar, a peach, currants, gooseberries, raspberries,
loganberries and blueberries. But what excites me
most are the suggestions made by a man called Ken
Fern.
Once a London bus driver, Fern has spent most of
his life cataloguing and growing the edible species
of fruit and vegetable which can sur vive in this coun-
try. His list now extends to 7000, some of which are
featured in his book
Plants for a Future
. I’ve decided
to buy an Arnold Thorn (Crataegus arnoldiana), which
belongs to the same genus as the hawthorn, but
grows sweet juicy fruits the size of cherries, and to
replace my hedge with Eleagnus x ebbingei, which
produces sweet red berries with edible seeds, in
(uniquely) April and May. This means, if it works out,
that I can eat fresh fruit all the year round. I can
store apples and Beurre Rance pears until the Elea-
gnus fruits, then my strawberries should be ready
more or less when it stops. One day when I can
afford it I will buy more land and plant a few dozen
of the weird species Fern has found.
Most people have less space than I do, but even
a tiny garden can support half a dozen apple trees,
if you grow them as cordons (single stems with shor t
spurs) 80cm apart against a wall. If you have room
for only a couple of pots, you could grow blueber-
ries, strawberries, cranberries or some of the little
shrubs Ken Fern recommends, such as Vaccinium
praestans and Gaultheria shallon.
Or you could become a guerilla planter or guerilla
graf ter, growing fruit on roadsides, on commons and
in parks and wasteland. Apple twigs of any kind can
be grafted onto crab trees. Medlars and one breed
of pear (a delicious variety called Josephine des
Malines) can be grafted onto hawthorn. Kiwi fruit,
passion f ruit and a vine called Schisandra grandiflora
will climb into trees of any kind.
It’s not just the produce I love. When you start
growing fruit, you enter a world of recondite knowl-
edge, accumulated over centuries of amateur
experiments.
You must choose the right rootstocks and polli-
nators and learn about bees, birds and caterpillars.
But above all you must learn patience. Growing fruit
forces you to think ahead, to imagine a sweeter
future and then to wait.
Perhaps it is this, as much as the forgotten fla-
vours, that I have been missing.
This article was first published in The Guardian;
www.monbiot.com
.
The variety of native fruits on
sale is smaller than it has been
for 200 years

Loading

© 2015 Village Magazine

Back to Top