Somewhere in a veteran orchard in Harrow, west London, there is an apple tree that does not officially exist. Not in the sense that it isn’t real. It is real enough to have produced fruit for who knows how many decades. It does not exist in the sense that matters to a pomologist, because until recently nobody had any idea what variety it actually was.
That changed when the London Orchard Project sent leaf samples from a handful of the capital’s oldest, quietest community orchards off for DNA analysis at a research station in Kent. The results, when they came back, matched two of London’s mystery trees to varieties nobody had records of in the national collection at all. One might be a variety called Rymer, thought lost. Another may be something called Stoke Lump Lemon, a name that sounds invented and almost certainly is not.
I did not expect apple conservation to feel like detective work. It turns out that is exactly what it is.
How Much Was Actually Lost
The scale of what has disappeared is worth considering for a moment. Somewhere in the region of seventeen thousand apple varieties have existed worldwide, and roughly eighty per cent of them are believed to be gone. Britain alone once grew something like three thousand distinct varieties, each shaped by a particular region, soil, climate and generations of local preference for how an apple should actually taste. The national fruit collection at Brogdale in Kent now holds around 2,200 of them, preserved as living trees rather than seeds, since an apple famously does not grow true from its own pips. Of those thousands, only a small handful are widely recognised today. Most people could probably name four or five apple varieties without thinking hard. There were, not so long ago, hundreds of times that many, each one specific to somewhere in particular.
Industrial scale cultivation is largely responsible, favouring apples that ship well, store well and look uniform on a shelf over apples that simply tasted remarkable in one particular Yorkshire village and nowhere else. The commercial extinction of a variety like the Beverley Pippin, once grown widely around East Yorkshire and now found almost nowhere, is not really a story about the apple failing. It is a story about an entire system deciding, gradually and mostly without anyone choosing it deliberately, that variety itself was not worth the inconvenience.
Where the Recovery Is Actually Happening
What makes this a genuinely hopeful story rather than simply a sad one is how much quiet, determined work has gone into finding what survived. The People’s Trust for Endangered Species maintains a running register of orchards across England and has so far identified around 35,000 of them, a number that keeps growing as more community groups, parish councils and individual gardeners get their own old trees properly surveyed and recorded. Each new entry on that register is a small chance that something thought gone has actually just been quietly fruiting in someone’s garden or a forgotten corner of common land, waiting to be noticed properly.
Community orchards themselves have multiplied steadily across the country, often planted specifically around threatened regional varieties rather than the small, familiar handful sold in supermarkets. In Cambridgeshire alone, orchards in Trumpington, Reach, Cambourne and several other villages have been established with exactly that intention, reviving apples that would otherwise exist only as a name in an old record book. English Heritage manages historic orchards at sites including Walmer Castle, where an apple called Blenheim Orange, dating from the 1700s, still grows alongside varieties bred as recently as the 1960s. At Barnard Castle, volunteers planted thirteen different apple types in a new community orchard, including Green Balsam, a North Yorkshire variety from the early nineteenth century, and Ashmead’s Kernel, older still.
Funding has followed the enthusiasm. The Coronation Community Orchard Scheme has been distributing tens of thousands of pounds to help new orchards get planted across whole districts, and councils including East Lindsey in Lincolnshire have used similar funding to establish entire networks of community orchards across dozens of towns and villages, each one another small, local chance for a nearly forgotten variety to find its way back into the ground.
A Tradition That Never Quite Left
Alongside the tree planting, an older custom has been quietly persisting too. Apple wassailing, an ancient practice from the West Country involving singing, noise and the odd piece of toast left in the branches to encourage a good crop, still happens in orchards up and down the country each January. It is a slightly eccentric thing to witness if you have never come across it before, and entirely earnest to the people who keep the tradition going. There is something fitting about a custom this old surviving alongside the very trees it was always meant to look after.
Why a Lost Apple Actually Matters
It would be easy to file all of this under harmless nostalgia, pleasant but not especially important. I don’t think that is quite right. Each named variety carries a small, specific piece of local history with it, the place it was first grown, the family or orchard it is named after, sometimes a small joke or observation embedded in the name itself. Losing a variety is not just losing a taste. It is losing one particular, irreplaceable answer to the question of what an apple grown in that specific soil, in that specific corner of the country, over that many generations, actually turned out like.
There is a practical dimension too, easy to overlook. A narrow handful of commercially dominant varieties is more vulnerable to disease and changing growing conditions than a genuinely wide, resilient pool of different apples adapted to slightly different local conditions. The orchards being planted now, stubbornly full of varieties nobody has heard of, are quietly hedging against a future nobody can fully predict, one tree and one nearly lost name at a time.
Still Looking
What I find most appealing about all of this is that the search is clearly not finished. Somewhere out there, in a garden or a forgotten hedge line or the corner of a churchyard, there are almost certainly more trees like the ones found in Harrow, growing quietly, correctly identified by nobody yet. The apple detectives, as it turns out, still have cases open.
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