Bramley's Seedling

About the plant

The apple that fills every English pie began as a pip planted by a girl. Around 1809 Mary Ann Brailsford sowed apple seeds in a pot in her garden at Southwell in Nottinghamshire and planted out the seedling that came up; it grew into a tree that bore enormous green apples with a sharp flavour that cooked to a froth. The cottage changed hands, and when a local nurseryman, Henry Merryweather, asked the owner, a butcher named Matthew Bramley, for cuttings in 1856, Bramley agreed on condition that the apple should carry his name. Merryweather sold it from 1865, and the Royal Horticultural Society gave it a first-class certificate in 1883, the year before the Pomona painted it.

It is a triploid, with three sets of chromosomes instead of two, which makes it vigorous, enormous and infertile: a Bramley needs two other apples nearby to set fruit, and in return it bears heavily and keeps until spring. The original tree blew down in a gale in 1900, rooted again from where the trunk touched the ground, and was still bearing in the twenty-first century. Edith Bull painted the fruit for the second volume of the Pomona in 1884, among the culinary apples, when it was still a novelty outside the Midlands.