From little pips great apple trees do grow — just ask the Bramleys

By mclough

I T ALL BEGAN when teenager Mary Ann Brailsford took a handful of pips from an apple she was eating, popped them into a pot of soil — and waited.

It's something that's been done a million times over across the world, both by kids and by avid gardeners, though what 18-year-old Mary Ann did in her garden was to hatch a million-to-one chance that would eventually sprout into a huge horticultural success story.

One of Mary Ann's tiny plants was to grow into a tree that would one day bear fruit called Bramley's Seedling.

Exactly two centuries later, the Bramley heads a £50million apple empire and is still steadfastly the world's favourite cooker.

If there were ever such a thing, this botanical colossus would surely win a "Brammy Award" for endurance and enjoyment.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of its creation, 200 grafts from the original mother tree that's still thriving at Southwell, Nottinghamshire, have been distributed among gardening outlets across the UK.

And Rosemoor at Torrington is one of them.

So how did Bramley gets its name? For starters, it should perhaps be known as Brailsford Seedling or even Merryweather Seedling — the first after the young lass who went a-planting back in 1809 and the second after the young nurseryman who came, saw and decided the apples looked a slice above the rest.

Yet we have to roll on nearly 50 years for the real action — and the answer. By 1856 a local butcher, Matthew Bramley, was living at Mary Ann's old house, complete with the now-mature tree that was yet to carry a name.

One day he had a visit from nurseryman Henry Merryweather who asked Matthew if he could take cuttings from the tree and sell the fruit.

The astute Matthew gave the nod to Henry, but only on condition the apple carried the Bramley name.

Six years later, in 1862, Bramley became a commercial commodity when the entrepreneural Henry sold three fruits for two shillings — a heady sum, surely, for early Victorian England.

Today, around 500 commercial growers in the UK sell a staggering 100,000 tonnes of this cracking cruncher every year.

And so to Rosemoor 2009. In the fruit tree field stands a young Bramley — just 5ft high — which was given celebrity treatment last month.

Alan French, master of the Worshipful Company of Fruiterers, who donated the tree to Rosemoor, wielded the ceremonial spade for the 36th time this year and duly made life more comfortable for Bramley junior with help from some of the garden's nourishing soil. Next to him was Celia Steven, a self-confessed Bramley-phile and great-granddaughter of Henry.

Herself a grandmother to six, Celia travelled from her home — Bramley Lodge — at Buckland Monachorum, near Tavistock, and said afterwards: "Henry would have been very impressed with what Rosemoor had laid on. The Bramley was done proud — they could not have honoured it any better."

Celia, who moved from her native Notts to Devon in 1998, is passionate about Bramley. So much so, in fact, that she recently led a party of a dozen school children to the Houses of Parliament, complete with apple pies and cakes, and she has received an information pack and recipes from a Bramley fan club in Japan. She was also honoured by pupils of her village school who put on a surprise play centred around Bramley and, furthermore, her family — her brother Roger Merryweather is the ex-High Sheriff of Nottingham — donated a stained-glass window to the parish church at Southwell depicting 200 years of the iconic apple.

Celia is also heavily involved in the Community Orchards project . . . and she even has Bramley as part of her e-mail address.

Back in 1995 I spent a lively hour interviewing another of Henry Merryweather's great-grandchildren, Bernard Merryweather, at his Northam home. An extrovert-plus, Bernard proudly showed me his home-grown Bramleys and led me through the variety's pages of history, interspersed with a handful of humorous tales. He died in 2001 aged 89.

Celia tells me she has no knowledge of Bernard, despite their family tree equality, but plans to do her own digging to try to establish what precise bond exists between the pair.

Rosemoor's events organiser Diana Gilding says: "The tree will be a feature here for many years. If we can keep it going for as long as the original Bramley then we shall feel very pleased with ourselves."