Britain's favourite cooking apple grew from pips a girl planted in 1809.
Mary Ann Brailsford planted some apple pips in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. She moved away and probably never tasted the fruit. A later owner, a butcher called Matthew Bramley, let a nurseryman take cuttings on one condition: the apples bore his name. The original tree is still alive.
The tree grew from pips Brailsford sowed as a young girl in 1809. She left when she married and died in 1852, never knowing her seedling would become famous. In 1846 the cottage was bought by Matthew Bramley, a local butcher. Ten years later a local nurseryman, Henry Merryweather, asked to take cuttings and sell the apples. Bramley agreed, provided they carried his name. Merryweather's accounts record the first sale on 31 October 1862: three Bramley apples for two shillings.
The variety earned its fame in the kitchen. Bramleys are large, often two or three times the weight of a dessert apple, and too sour for most people to eat raw, but when cooked they turn golden and fluffy, perfect for pies, crumbles and sauce. The first commercial orchard was planted in 1910. By 2007 Bramleys made up about 95 per cent of the culinary apple orchards of England and Wales, and County Armagh's Bramleys have protected status.
Growing one takes a little planning. The Bramley is a triploid, with sterile pollen: it needs another variety nearby to pollinate it but cannot return the favour, so it is usually planted with two other apple varieties. The trees are big, vigorous and long-lived, tolerate some shade and resist scab and mildew. Commercial stock differs slightly from the original, probably because of unnoticed mutations over the years; trees cloned directly from the original in 1990 grow noticeably more compact.
The mother tree has had a hard life. It was blown over in a storm in 1900 and survived to keep fruiting. Scientists at the University of Nottingham cloned it because it was ageing and under attack from honey fungus, and in 2016 it was reported to be possibly dying, yet it was still bearing fruit in 2024. Nottingham Trent University bought the property in 2018 to preserve the tree.
Source: Wikipedia — Bramley apple · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
