From October until Christmas, the air in our little conservatory is heady with the fragrance of ripe apples. The scent transports me to childhood family outings from Christmases past, to a Sussex orchard, to buy small, aromatic Cox’s orange pippins with russeted skins and juicy yellow flesh, individually wrapped in tissue stamped with the producer’s name, packed in shallow wooden crates.
I’ve hankered after an orchard of my own ever since, but make do, in our small suburban garden, with three apple trees. The outsized, knobbly fruits of Peasgood’s Nonsuch, bred in 1853, bruise easily, have a lemony flavour and cook to a perfect puree in minutes, but don’t keep beyond November. James Grieve, dating from 1890, has red and yellow skin redolent of a winter sunset. The third variety, its name long forgotten, is a crunchy, sweet eater with festive red peel that lasts until Christmas.
Commercially, our crop would be disastrous: in a good year, we harvest about a quarter of the fruit; birds, insects and fungi take the rest. But the joy of cultivating those trees extends far beyond sensory pleasures. There are months of memories in every bite: pollinating bumblebees in spring, lacewings and ladybirds feeding on aphids, blue tits hunting looper caterpillars, semi-comatose red admirals drunk on juice fermenting in autumn sunshine, and blackbirds pecking fallen fruit on frosty mornings. And this year our mini-orchard fulfilled a long‑held ambition.
Mistletoe (Viscum album), often parasitic on apple trees, is rare in County Durham. In December 2017, we bought some at a Christmas market, saved berries until they became soft and sticky, then smeared them into bark crevices of a crab apple, planted as a pollinator for the culinary varieties. They germinated quickly, penetrating their host with sucker-like haustoria. Nothing more happened for two years, until slight swellings appeared under the bark – then disappeared again.
It seemed like failure – until this spring, when two of the latent parasites erupted, sprouting serpentine shoots with leathery leaves, flanking pointed buds that resemble tiny reptilian heads. Now we wait on tenterhooks for flowering in spring; mistletoe plants are either male or female, so we’ll need one of each for a harvest of berried shoots next Christmas.
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