Wildings (apples)
By Daniel Butler, author and forager
A hundred yards from my Welsh smallholding there is a straggly hedge. It hasn’t been laid for years. It is thin, bare-bottomed and unremarkable – apart from a week in spring when it is festooned with pink blossom and for a month in autumn when the boughs are weighed down with small green spheres.
These are often mistakenly called crab apples, but in reality they are ‘wildings’: feral apple trees. Genuine wild crabs probably no longer exist in Britain because the Malus group are incredibly heterozygous. They need insects to transfer pollen from another tree to fertilise their blossom – and those bees and moths will flit from one cultivar to another, mixing genes. As a result over the 3,000+ years that cultivated apples have been grown in Britain, native and domesticated apples will have become hopelessly genetically jumbled.
Most hedgerow wildings stem from a discarded core. Many probably came from a labourer’s lunch, pushed into a hedge bottom. This was a way of getting something for nothing, a hedge is effectively unused ground: so a fruit tree growing in a boundary gives both landowners a potentially useful free crop.
In some years wildings can be incredibly abundant
Picture: Author’s own
Not surprisingly wildings are commonest in fruit-growing areas like Herefordshire, Kent and Somerset, but they can crop up anywhere. For example, in Cumbria when common land was first enclosed during the 18th century, it was standard practice to plant one apple for every three thorns.
Many revert towards their wild ancestor, the crab, but just occasionally they can produce useful ‘sports’. This is how we got our 4,000 varieties of dessert, cooking and cider apples. Whatever the variety, however, its seeds contain a jumble of genetic material derived from the tree on which it grew and the pollen that fertilised the blossom. In other words, it will not germinate to produce a tree identical to the one on which it grew, but instead will produce a new tree bearing some of the qualities of each parent. Nurserymen get round this problem by grafting cuttings taken from a desirable variety onto the roots of another. Thus all Granny Smiths are clones of a single pip that germinated in an Australian lady’s compost heap and perhaps more incredibly, today’s Decio eating apple is genetically identical to the one brought here by Roman general Ezio from Italy in AD450.
But back to the small hard fruit currently growing in profusion in local hedges. Most will be far too tart to eat, but they still have their culinary uses. They are very high in pectin, so make a great jelly. This is pretty bland, but it makes a great ‘base’ for other flavours. Try jarring up a batch and putting a sprig of rosemary or slivers of chilli before it sets. The first goes brilliantly with lamb or venison, while the second works wonders with pork or cheese.
Autumn hedging can be fruitful
Picture: Author’s own
While wildings are variable in their qualities, generally a good mix of apples from various trees will produce a tart apple juice that is the perfect starting point for a brilliant scrumpy.