Ted Hobday stands among the medlars and the quince, leads us up through the pears, past the Black Worcester and the Belles des Arbres, the Conference and the Winter Orange. This is Brogdale Farm, near Faversham in Kent, home to the National Fruit Collections, the largest collection of fruit trees and plants in the world.
Though Kent has lost more than 85% of its orchards over the last 50 years, more apples are grown here than anywhere else in Britain. We are on the dip slope of the North Downs, the sea, seven miles distant, sweeping in bitter north-east winds from the continent. Beneath our feet, some 9ft of loam lies atop chalk, aiding the trees' drainage. This is prime fruit-growing land.
Summertime brings the cherries and plums, the gooseberries, redcurrants, whitecurrants, black. Now is the time for the apples and pears – barns full, trees heavy, the fallen fruit rotting into mulch. Once the cold weather sets in for the dormant season, the trees will be pruned back, ready to begin again come the spring.
There is something rich and well-steeped in Hobday's talk; an official guide here at Brogdale, he grew up in this corner of Kent, spent his summers picking fruit, knows that Britain is one of the few countries in the world to have savoury and dessert apples, tells you with a smile the best way to eat a medlar.
"When it's bletted, which is a polite way of saying gone rotten. Wait until it's gone squidgy, and then there's two ways to eat it, the couth or the uncouth. The uncouth is to squeeze it into your mouth and then spit the pips out." He laughs, and his breath blooms a soft white in the cold air.
Hobday talks of rootstocks and seedlings, pollination and blossoming, and of the land lying empty, left to re-propagate, a process of reinvigoration that means for a stretch of six years the soil can be used to grow flax or honesty, but not fruit. We pass the orchards used for trials – apples still unnamed, unproven. Fruit trials, he tells us, take six years, and no more than 5% of these new varieties will make their way to the shops. Some fruit, we learn, begins as a seedling — the Golden Delicious, say, or the Granny Smith. Others naturally mutate, and others are deliberate propagated — the Jonagold apple or the Concorde pear, a marriage of the Doyenne du Comice and the Conference. We pause by the wild Plymouth pear, an ornamental that grows in and around the south-western city, its fruit no bigger than a thumbnail and a blossom that in spring gives off the pungent aroma of a tomcat.
Hobday leads us across a bare field, once home to the plum stock, and past a row of alders dense enough to protect the fruit from the wind but, unlike the often-used leylandii, open enough to let through bees that pollinate the trees. "This," says Hobday as we round the corner, "is the commencement of 2,200 varieties of apples." In the autumn sunshine the apple trees stand in endless rows, their glassy leaves turning, their boughs drooped with reddened fruit.
Of the 2,200 varieties, around 650 are British: the Pippins, September Beauty, Eynsham Dumpling, Great Expectations, Melrose, Norfolk Royal Russet. But there are interlopers too, apples from America and France, from Crimea and Ukraine – the Wealthy, a characteristically woolly apple from the American midwest, the tall, striking Ballerina, the Vincent, the Pomme de Glace, the New Yorker and the King Coffee.
Hobday carves us slivers of apple, crisp and sweet and cold. An apple straight from the tree tastes different to one from the supermarket. Now apples are chosen for their good looks and their hardiness, their ability to weather the rough-and-tumble of the supermarket shelves. Flavour, these days, is less important to the mass market, and the apples are picked before they are ready, ripening in cold stores, far away from the tree.
British apples taste different to other apples, says Hobday; other countries like their apples to have only a sweetness. In Britain we like our apples with not just a sweetness, but a tanginess too. His penknife presses deep into the flesh of a Pippin, the bitter wind whipping our faces.
