Today completes a trifecta of shared articles about trees, and Sam Knight gets extra thanks for the link with a part of food heritage our family is especially fond of (which led to finding the video above):

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

The English Apple Is Disappearing

As the country loses its local cultivars, an orchard owner and a group of biologists are working to record and map every variety of apple tree they can find in the West of England.

In June, 1899, Sabine Baring-Gould, an English rector, collector of folk songs, and author of a truly prodigious quantity of prose, was putting the finishing touches on “A Book of the West,” a two-volume study of Devon and Cornwall. Baring-Gould, who had fifteen children and kept a tame bat, wrote more than a thousand literary works, including some thirty novels, a biography of Napoleon, and an influential study of werewolves. In the preface to his latest, he wrote that it was neither a guide book nor a history of the counties, which would have made it too heavy to carry. Instead, Baring-Gould had chosen to “pick out some incident, or some biography” to elucidate the places that he described. The town of Honiton was notable for its lace; Torquay for its caves; Tiverton for Old Snow, a kindly male witch who had died a few years earlier.

Baring-Gould devoted thirteen pages of his description of Crediton, a “curious, sleepy place” on the banks of the river Creedy, in the heart of Devon, to its apples. For months of the year, the town was awash in fruit and cider. The soil all around was red. In the orchards, trees were heavy with everything from “griggles” (small, stunted apples left over for children) to storied cider-making varieties, such as Kingston Black and Cherry Pearmain. In the fall, Baring-Gould wrote, “The grass of the orchard is bright with crimson and gold as though it were studded with jewels.” Life in the Creedy valley was dense with ancient apple lore, such as “S. Frankin’s Days,” in May, when the Devil might bring a late frost; the firing of blank charges into the bare branches of apple trees on Old Christmas Day, to bring good luck; and “wassailing” the trees, or singing to their health. There had been tough times for apple growers earlier in the century, with the rise of beer and imports from America. But those threats were on the wane. “The trees are having their good times again,” Baring-Gould wrote.

The trees are not having good times now. On a blustery morning a few weeks ago, I drove to Crediton to visit Sandford Orchards, the largest remaining cider mill in town. The factory was cut into the side of a steep hill so that it could stay cool all year round. One of its oak vats, the General, dates from 1903 and holds ten thousand gallons of fermenting apple juice. When I arrived, the proprietor, Barny Butterfield, was in conversation with a colleague about the flavor profile of the latest batch of Devon Dry, one of the company’s ciders. “There’s no recipe!” Butterfield told me, a little giddily.

Butterfield reopened the ciderworks in 2014. (The original occupant, Creedy Valley Cider, closed in 1967.) Since then, he has become a prominent—and occasionally isolated—advocate for Britain’s encyclopedic variety of apples, of which there are more than two and a half thousand cultivars. The Romans, most likely, brought the first rootstocks. The Saxons inscribed the fruit into land and myth. (Avalon, the Arthurian paradise, means “land of apples.”) The Victorians went melanzane for them. (“Melanzana,” Italian for “eggplant,” comes from “mala insana,” or “mad apple.”) Apples are now the national fruit. But the British apple industry is deep in crisis. Most people agree that the market, which divides into dessert—or eating—apples and cider apples, is broken in one way or another. Butterfield, who is forty-seven, took me upstairs to his office, which was dotted with old stoneware jugs and scientific papers from the nineteen-fifties detailing the juice composition of cider-apple varieties, and sat down at his desk. “We’re going into the crater,” he said.

When Baring-Gould wrote about Crediton, Devon had twenty-six thousand acres of apple orchards. Ninety per cent of those are thought to be gone. And the growers who are left are losing money fast. According to British Apples & Pears Limited (B.A.P.L.), a trade organization that represents three hundred apple and pear farmers in the country, the cost of producing apples in the U.K. has increased by thirty per cent since 2021—an uptick driven mainly by rising energy prices and labor costs. During the same period, retail prices have risen by only a quarter of that. “So there’s a big gap,” Ali Capper, the executive chair of B.A.P.L., told me last week. “Mind the gap, I’ve started to say.”

Capper grows cider and dessert apples overlooking the Malvern Hills, by the border between Worcestershire and Herefordshire. She said that the cost of producing a pack of six Gala apples, a cultivar first developed in New Zealand in the nineteen-thirties, which is one of Britain’s most popular apples, was currently one pound and six pence. But the supermarkets weren’t paying that. “I would be surprised if there’s any retailer in the U.K that is paying a pound,” Capper said.

The British grocery market is an oligopoly. Eight retailers control ninety-two per cent of sales. A recent report by the House of Lords Horticultural Sector Committee described their power as “behemothic.” They can source cold-stored Galas from all over the world. (About sixty per cent of apples sold in the U.K. are imported.) For cultural, possibly griggle-related, reasons, British consumers like a small apple, one that fits easily in the hand. The U.S. and Asian markets prefer larger fruit, so foreign farmers can often sell smaller apples that have been rejected by their own retailers to British grocers at a discount. “It’s very difficult to compete with that,” Capper said…

Read the whole article here.