Britain's first orchard with apples all grown from discarded cores in waysides

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Britain's first orchard with apples all grown from discarded cores in waysides.

Transcript

00:00My name is James Ferguson. I am an orchardist and the owner of Vagrant Cider.

00:06I'm William Arnold. I'm an artist, photographer, sort of, I guess, kind of a landscape historian.

00:13I teach natural history photography at Falmouth University. I'm very interested in apples, as you can probably tell.

00:21I'm Caitlin DeSilvi. I'm a professor of cultural geography at the University of Exeter, based down here in Cornwall.

00:27And I've been working with these guys for a couple of years on the sort of research angles that are connected to this project.

00:33We are at the Wilding Mother Orchard. We are on the south side of the Helford River at a patch called Panarvan, just above Panarvan Cove.

00:43And we're sitting in a field that has 80 rootstocks inside the guards that you can see around us.

00:50And on to those 80 apple rootstocks, we have grafted about 30 seedling, wilding apple trees that have been selected through public taste trials

01:02to try and figure out whether we can identify future apples that might have potential in a changing climate.

01:09This project, Some Interesting Apples, was started by Will and myself about five years ago now.

01:17And really, it came out of our noticing the sheer profusion of wild seedling apples that are in the locale from where we live,

01:26particularly in the Redroof Mining District. That's really what started this whole thing off,

01:31that there are hundreds, way, way more seedling apple trees in that area than one would normally anticipate.

01:37We decided that we would start to hold taste trial events at the Kessel Barton Royal Arts Centre,

01:43just up the road from where the orchard here is.

01:45And we were talking about how wonderful it would be for us to have an orchard of these seedlings that we collected.

01:51And we were like, well, we've just got some land that's come available from a tenant farmer in Helford.

01:56Let's see if we can do something with that.

01:58And fortunately, because it coincided with funding being available from the Forest for Cornwall,

02:03we were suddenly able to get the trees in the ground in record time.

02:08Normally, I would anticipate that an institution like that would be like turning an oil tank around.

02:12And it happened from April. And then the following winter, we had the trees in the ground.

02:16Yeah, so the exhibition, I mean, the gathering was April 2023.

02:19Yeah.

02:20By February 2024, we were putting the rootstock in the ground.

02:24It was mad. It was great.

02:25It was amazing.

02:26And that's where you find us today, with the trees in the ground, grass growing very, very quickly.

02:31And the grafts that we carried out last winter also growing profusely.

02:37It's very gratifying to see, isn't it?

02:39Trialling each of these unique trees on three different rootstocks.

02:43So we're trialling them on a dwarfing rootstock, which is M26.

02:48We're trialling them on a three-quarter standard, MM111, and we're trialling them on Mala Silvestris,

02:55or as close to pure Mala Silvestris as we could obtain, to see how they perform in the same location,

02:59but with different root structures too.

03:01That's more.

03:02And one of the Apple stories that I love about this place is that I also think it's a really interesting opportunity

03:09to talk to kids about things like change and climate change.

03:12Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:13So my son, who will be wandering through at some point, goes to a school where there's an apple tree growing out of the hedge in the schoolyard.

03:20And it's probably about 40 years old.

03:22It's just growing, obviously, out of the rocks.

03:24Like some kid took a core, shoved it in there.

03:27Apple tree grew.

03:28So we did put that in the taste trials.

03:30It did pretty well.

03:31Its name is Good Item Ooze.

03:33And so Good Item Ooze is now growing here.

03:35And those kids have this connection to that tree and to this place and the future apples.

03:42And so that kind of, the storytelling about it, I think, is really important as well.

03:48So it's not just a scientific trial.

03:50It's got stories attached to every tree.

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