Strange Fruit

I feel almost shy about writing this column. It contains no revelations, nocall to arms. No one gets savaged: well, only mildly. The subject is almostinconsequential. 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 areforced to admit that the quality and variety of most types of food sold inBritain 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 seemsto taste the same: either rock hard and dry or wet and bland. A mango may beambrosia in India; it tastes like soggy toilet paper in the UK. And the varietyof native fruits on sale is smaller than it has been for 200 years.

Why? Most people believe it’s because the supermarkets select for appearancenot taste. This might be true for vegetables, but for fruit it’s evidentlywrong. Green mangoes, Conference pears, unripe Bramley, Granny Smith or GoldenDelicious apples look about as appealing as a shrink-wrapped stool. Appearancehas nothing to do with it. What counts to the retailer is how well the varietytravels.

Take the Egremont Russet, for example. It’s a small apple that looks like aconker wrapped in sandpaper. But it has one inestimable quality. It can bedropped 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 plantin John O’Groats, via Sydney, Washington and Vladivostock, then back to asuperstore in Penzance (this is the preferred route for most of the fruit soldin the UK) and remain fit for sale. The supermarkets must have had some troubleshifting it because of its strange appearance, so they promoted it as aconnoisseur’s apple. Such is our suggestibility that almost everyone believesthis, though a dispassionate tasting would show you that it’s as sweet andjuicy as a box of Kleenex.

For the same reason, we are assaulted with Conference pears, most of whichresemble some kind of heavy ordnance, rather than any one of a hundred exquisitevarieties such as the Durondeau, Belle Julie, Urbaniste, Glou Morceau, Ambrosia,Professeur du Breuil or Althorp Crasanne. It is because these pears are sodelicious that they cannot be marketed. They melt in the mouth, which means theywould 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, thegrocers ensure that we never eat them.

To compound the problem, the supermarkets demand that fruit is picked longbefore it ripens: it doesn’t soften until it rots. This makes great commercialsense. 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. Theonly way to find out is either to travel abroad or (the low-carbon option) togrow your own. I find myself becoming a fruit evangelist, a fructivist, whosemission is to show people what they are missing.

When I lived in Oxford, at a time when allotments were underused, I spent a weekin the Bodleian library reading Hogg and Bull’s Herefordshire Pomona, amassive book of apples and pears, written in the 1870s (you can now buy it on CDfrom the Marcher Apple Network). Then I cleared two and a half plots and plantedthe best varieties I could find. I left just as the trees were ready to fruit.But land here in mid-Wales is cheap. I bought half an acre and have startedplanting a second orchard.

When I first tried to place an order, I caused great excitement among thenurseries I phoned. Where had I seen these apples? Who recommended them? Two ofthem, I discovered, had been extinct for at least 50 years. So I have had tosettle for second best, by which I mean breeds which still exist. I began byplanting a Ribston Pippin and an Ashmead’s Kernel. These apples, bothexquisite when fully ripe, can be stored from October till May. To spread thefruit as far through the year as possible, I have ordered an apple called theIrish 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 havepinned down the apple I once tasted and loved in a friend’s garden. I’mpretty confident that it was a Forfar, also know as the Dutch Mignonne, soI’ve bought one of those too. If I’d had more space, I would also haveplanted 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 (theCambridge Gage), a fig, a medlar, a peach, currants, gooseberries, raspberries,loganberries and blueberries. But what excites me most are the suggestions madeby a man called Ken Fern. Once a London bus driver, Fern has spent most of hislife cataloguing and growing the edible species of fruit and vegetable which cansurvive in this country. His list now extends to 7000, some of which arefeatured 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, butgrows sweet juicy fruits the size of cherries, and to replace my hedge withEleagnus 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 freshfruit all the year round. I can store apples and Beurre Rance pears until theEleagnus fruits, then my strawberries should be ready more or less when itstops. One day when I can afford it I will buy more land and plant a few dozenof the weird species Fern has found.

Most people have less space than I do, but even a tiny garden can support half adozen apple trees, if you grow them as cordons (single stems with short spurs)80cm apart against a wall. If you have room for only a couple of pots, you couldgrow blueberries, strawberries, cranberries or some of the little shrubs KenFern recommends, such as Vaccinium praestans and Gaultheria shallon. Or youcould become a guerilla planter or guerilla grafter, growing fruit on roadsides,on commons and in parks and wasteland. Apple twigs of any kind can be graftedonto crab trees. Medlars and one breed of pear (a delicious variety calledJosephine des Malines) can be grafted onto hawthorn. Kiwi fruit, passion fruitand 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 aworld of recondite knowledge, accumulated over centuries of amateur experiments.You must choose the right rootstocks and pollinators and learn about bees, birdsand caterpillars. But above all you must learn patience. Growing fruit forcesyou to think ahead, to imagine a sweeter future and then to wait. Perhaps it isthis, as much as the forgotten flavours, that I have been missing.

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