Malus sieversii

This weekend sees a celebration of apples in the John Hope Gateway. Cultivars from gardens and collections grown throughout Scotland will be laid out on tables for comparing and contrasting. This is your chance to shake a Cox’s Orange Pippin. Only when ripe will the pips rattle. There will be an opportunity to press and juice your own apples, prior to this; have them identified by apple growers.

Malus sieversii collected as scion material from Kazakstan is the distant; geographically and genetically, parent of many of the cultivars on show during Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th October at the Gateway. We have a young tree grafted onto a Malling Merton rootstock growing in the nursery. Unfortunately someone has scrumped all the apples from the tree!

Malus sieversii

Producing the largest fruit of all the species within the genus, and as can be seen from the attached image, of high quality. Found through N.E. Asia it is vulnerable to extinction in the wild; growing in woods on mountainsides. With increasing development and need for housing the habitat is being eaten away.

Worldwide there are thought to be in the region of 7500 apple cultivars. The apple is one of the earliest fruits to be selected out for better forms to cultivate. Many of the older cultivars are low yielding and often susceptible to disease. They do however provide a range of flavours and textures not found in modern cultivars.