July 2015

The apple blossom has now long gone and the small green round fruit is beginning to form.  I wonder if you have ever wondered how apples became so sweet and delicious?  Anyone who has ever bitten into a Crab Apple will know how sharp their taste can be.  However a Russet or Cox’s Orange Pippin or a Golden Delicious or Granny Smith apples are lovely and sweet and easy to eat.

Well, apparently we have vegetarian bears in and around Kazakhstan to thank for this. Apparently, this is the region of the world where the first apples appeared, vast forests of apple trees.  In these forests lived many locally adapted Brown Bears Ursus arctos whose food consisted of mainly a vegetarian diet.  Their favourite food was apples, and when these were in season, the bears knew exactly which trees bore the sweetest fruit.

Over thousands of years, the bears selected only the sweetest fruit and ate the whole apple, including the pips which passed through them intact and passed them out of their bodies bathed in nutrient rich compost.  These bears would migrate from region to region and in the process spread these seeds into new areas, which just happened to be on the old silk trails between China and Europe.  Travellers would find these apple trees and discovered how sweet their fruit was.  The traders collected the apples and brought them to Europe to sell in markets.  Consequently, seeds were germinated and the apple was introduced into Europe, including, eventually, the British Isles.

Apple farming became popular, especially in Kent, where, incidentally, most of the traders arrived after crossing the Straits of Dover, the narrowest crossing point from the Continent.  These farmers went on to develop vegetative propagation techniques, such as budding and grafting, to produce varieties that were good from generation to generation.  The more bitter varieties were used in cider making.

In order for apple seeds to be viable, the blossom has to be pollinated. Insects such as bumblebees and honeybees are the normal pollinators, but it has recently been discovered that blue tits are also fond of nectar and are just as effective at pollinating apples as the insects.  They may be the only British bird that is doing this.
Martyn Stenning