The cherry is by far my favourite fruit but apples,plums,pears and raspberries are not far behind. I have never had a natural ability at growing fruit and vegetables although by amateur standards I am not too bad. I think this has led to my having a fascination with commercial fruit and vegetable cultivation from the Rhubarb triangle near Wakefield to artichoke production in Brittany. This is a tad ironic because at horticultural college I opted to study Medicinal horticulture instead of Commercial horticulture( which focussed on fruit production because it was in Kent). As a result I was endlessly teased by the fruit growers that I spent my time skipping by the light of the full moon to harvest lavender.
I suppose I felt that commercial fruit growing is essentially a practical process and although that is interesting it has little romance to it. Effectively I wanted to grow commercial quality fruit (without the pesticides) in a classic English orchard with bulbs and wild flowers in the long grass beneath it and maybe some pigs being fattened up on the windfall apples. It was a version of the classic romanticized image of the English small holder when the air was clear, the water sweet and industrialization of farming had not tainted the purity of the magical shire-land of England. Complete nonsense of course.
Tied in with this was another notion of mine that I wanted to have an orchard like Ulysses, from the Greek story of the Odyssey, had had in his kingdom so he could go into the orchard and pick the freshest, tastiest fruit from the trees there. Eventually through the acquisition of an allotment, in Brixton of all places, I have obtained a version of these two romantic images as I have planted red, white and blackcurrants as well as apples, plums and cherries. The only part of this childhood dream that did not come to pass is that I never did stare deep into the eyes of the real life fair Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world whose empathy for others was so great that she had a brooch of dripping blood to symbolize this.
I may not be quite as discerning as fair Helen as to what I put in my mouth but I do love food immensely. With these hanging threads pulled together as well as living in South East London I have made the pilgrimage down to the National fruit collection in Faversham, Kent to taste the fruit. As I said cherries are my favourite although not to the same extent as Fredrick the Great of Prussia (Old Fritz) who was prepared to spend the equivalent of 100 euro on a single fruit. Nevertheless I try to return every year to Brogdale in Faversham to taste the fruit and hear about its cultivation and the challenges facing the growers each year, usually from the weather.
Brogdale has become a political football, everyone pays lip service to its importance but no one is prepared to pay for its upkeep so it is jointly managed by the excellent volunteers of the Brogdale trust, Reading University and FAST(a business who are experts in Commercial fruit production).
But just in case you were wondering why it is so important let me explain. The fruit collection holds a huge number of fruit trees from all round the world. This gene pool is so diverse that it might offer future hybrids that could deal with the difficulties of climate change, pest and disease problems or indeed making the fruit trees themselves less vigorous for ease of picking in tandem with producing higher yields without additional cossetting.
Maybe that is a bit of blue skies thinking but these fruit trees are the creme de la creme of all the fruit tree breeding that has gone on from when the wild ancestors of these trees were brought in from the wild in pre-Roman times. Infact, Britain has led the way in fruit breeding particularly for apples so it seems not just a shame but a mistake to simply consider it such an insignificant part of our heritage, educational resources or indeed gene pool for research and development.
So perhaps consider a visit to Brogdale in July to eat the cherries or the apples in October and learn about the collection. You could even tie it in with a trip to Whitstable for oysters, another British food speciality.
A gardener out of this world 