Apple trees are very durable. In old age they may not look very pretty and they may stop bearing fruit (often because they are poorly maintained or because their companion pollinating tree has died and not been replaced). These factors have led to the demise of many a good old tree, ripped out by fussy and uninformed owners. In ages past an old tree would be propped, or left prostrate on the ground, if it had fallen. Our forebears saw the beauty of idiosyncratic, knarled, knobbled and leaning shapes.

Often, in moist ground, a fallen tree would re-root itself along the trunk, even if the rootball had become completely detached from the ground. It appears that fallen apple trees can endure more than one year without any root contact with the ground, relying on moisture stored within the tree or ground dampness absorbed through bark, even appearing to act like ‘air plants’ taking moisture from the air. We have seen several trees blossoming and fruiting a year after losing ground contact. If they can use this period to re-grow some roots, they can survive for a new lease of life.

Mounding up soil around a fallen trunk helps considerably. Often, they will send up new vertical shoots, forming new trees, along the line of the old trunk. One stunning old tree close to the nursery, owned by a Mr Forsyth, descendent of the famous William Forsyth, gardener to King George IV, had fallen and its multi-bended trunk bedded itself into the moist soil, looking like a sea serpent, dipping in and out of the waves, growing several new trunks. Unfortunately, an incompetent grass cutter decided the old trunk got in the way of the grass cutting and removed it!

Other trees try desperately to stay upright, even when they are hollow. Being hollow does not mark the end of life. The living ring (the Cambium layer, which draws life from the roots and from which new shoot growth begins) under the dead bark and outwards from the decaying centre has some rigidity, like the strength of a tube, and the tree will continue. Eventually, some of this cambium layer will die and the cylinder is breached, but even now the remaining crescent of a trunk can continue to give life. We have seen trees that have no more than a fifth of their trunk left, but still grow and fruit well.

This new 'old' tree, has only a thin thread, rounded and perhaps 3 inches wide, but supports life in a good healthy tree, recently covered in blossom and now forming a lot of fruit. Life for this tree may ‘hang by a thread’ but with a proper support and careful pruning to reduce the load on the fragile dead trunk, we believe the thread will re-grow to a new trunk and the tree may have another century or two in it.

We already know that pear trees can live in excess of 370 years (The Endicott Pear in America). In decades to come, we may be surprised by the longevity of the humble apple tree.

Why Is This So Very Important?
Quite simply, now that we have corroborating evidence of such longevity in apples, curiosity will increase, searching and researching will get underway in earnest, other old trees will get ‘certified’ ages and many more will be saved. Of equal importance (and now required by this discovery) will be a radical re-appraisal by the ‘establishment’ of just how many truly old and largely forgotten varieties of apple (and pear) are still growing out there.

Consider an old pear tree, by itself at the end of an old cottage garden, or perhaps hollow, scruffy and possibly fallen over in an old orchard, now largely filled with younger trees. Since we know pears can live over 400 years, it could have been planted in the early 1600’s, when John Parkinson was writing his Paradisus and Charles I was on the throne. It could be older, since we may yet find pears can live much longer and there is some evidence for this already.

Now consider that old Apple tree. Up to now, an old apple tree would have been summarily considered early 20th century, perhaps Victorian at best. But this particular tree could have been planted before the Battle of Waterloo (1815). Other living trees, for which date evidence has not yet been found, might even have been planted when America was a British colony (1776). It means that many old varieties, believed extinct and hardly inquired into, are still out there. It means that, when identifying apples in order to put a variety name to an old incognito tree, we must now consider thousands of different possible varieties and not just up to a thousand. It means that, when we have a historical reference to a ‘lost’ variety having been exhibited in 1883 we can no longer give up on it, assuming it cannot still be growing somewhere. We can start looking with hope.

It is time we took our old pear trees seriously, too. The number of varieties of pear grown in Britain in the last three centuries probably runs to over 2000. How many different varieties are known now, excluding major collections? A few hundred at best. But they could all still be out there.

We can also reduce the loss of old trees that comes all too frequently with poor apple (and pear) identification. There have been too many cases where the owner of an old apple tree has liked the fruit and wants to find out what it is. Having then been given an incorrect identification they have removed the old tree (often quite unnecessarily), to replace it with a new one supposedly of the same variety. Too late, the error is discovered. Wrong identification also leads to great future difficulties in correct naming, as several different varieties come down the years with the same name.

We must point out, before we cause any offence to apple identifiers, that there are some very good apple identifiers and the success rate is high when dealing with the many trees planted from the second half of the 20th century. With older trees it can be very difficult to be sure of correct identification. Possibilities, even probabilities can be suggested, but the correct advice is to leave room for doubt and preferably encourage the old tree owner to keep it going, have a new one grafted from the original tree - as insurance, or if the old tree cannot be saved.

If this view seems somewhat heretical and negative, consider this: There could be in excess of 5000 different named apple varieties still growing in orchards and gardens, throughout the nation. These are ones with names written of in the historical literature. It would be impossible to guess how many more existed as individual seedlings or varieties once known only locally and now anonymous. Adding together all the varieties that now exist in the major collections, that are traditionally British or long known and grown in this country, we get to little more than a thousand. The best memory in the land, with free access to the collections and years of study and experience, could not retain, in memory, all the diverse facets of these thousand apples, let alone 5000. They would never have seen the majority of the varieties across the land.

With the age evidence of this tree, along with the Bramley, it is now imperative that identification proceeds with caution. For old trees the base data is just not available. Eventually, though slow to be developed in this country from lack of government attention to traditional fruit, DNA fingerprinting will provide the differentiation. We must keep and research our old trees against that day.