Cox's Orange Pippin

About the plant

Richard Cox retired from brewing to a house at Colnbrook, on the Bath road near Slough, and about 1825 sowed the pips of a Ribston Pippin. One of the seedlings bore an apple of such flavour that the nurseryman Charles Turner of Slough took it up, and by the 1850s Cox's Orange Pippin was being talked of in the gardening papers as the finest dessert apple in England. It still is: a medium apple, orange-red over gold, with a juicy, aromatic, sharp-sweet flesh that nothing else matches. It is also a difficult tree, prone to canker and scab and fussy about climate, which held it back until the Kent growers learned to manage it in the 1880s and made it the apple of the English market.

The Pomona painted it with the Golden Harvey, an old Herefordshire russet known as the Brandy Apple because its juice was so rich that a bushel gave more spirit than any other; small, rough-skinned and intensely sweet, it was more valued for cider than for the table. Alice Ellis and Edith Bull painted both from fruit brought in by the club's members, with the blossom, and Severeyns of Brussels printed them in colour. The Pomona's plates are the best record there is of what English apples looked like before the supermarket.