Every Bramley apple comes from one tree
In 1809 a girl called Mary Ann Brailsford planted some apple pips in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. One grew into a tree whose large sour apples were perfect for cooking, and a later owner, Matthew Bramley, let a local nurseryman take cuttings. Every Bramley apple tree in the world descends from that one tree, which was still alive two centuries later.
That works because of GRAFTING. Apple pips do not grow true — a seed from a Bramley grows into a tree with quite different apples — so growers join a twig of the tree they want onto the ROOTS of another. The two grow together, and the new tree is a clone of the original. Most named fruit trees are made the same way. CUTTINGS are the simpler version: a snipped shoot of many plants, pushed into damp compost, will grow roots of its own.
Dig for Victory
When the Second World War began, Britain imported most of its food, and ships were being sunk. The government launched the Dig for Victory campaign in 1939, urging people to turn lawns, flowerbeds, parks and even the moat of the Tower of London into vegetable plots. The number of allotments rose to around 1.4 million.
An ALLOTMENT is a small plot of land rented cheaply from the local council for growing food. Plots are traditionally measured in rods, an old unit, with a standard plot of ten rods — about the size of a doubles tennis court. Many towns still have waiting lists that run for years.
The vegetable patch has surprises
CARROTS were usually purple or yellow until orange varieties were developed and grown widely in the Netherlands in the 1600s; purple ones are coming back into seed catalogues now. TOMATOES are botanically a fruit and belong to the same family as deadly nightshade, and in Britain they were grown for decades as an ornamental curiosity before many people were willing to eat them.
A SUNFLOWER packs its seeds in spirals running both ways across the head, and the numbers of spirals are usually neighbouring numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, such as 34 and 55. The arrangement fits the most seeds into the space. Our vegetables page covers the rest of the crop.
The jobs through the year
SOWING seeds, then thinning out each SEEDLING so the strongest has room; PLANTING out, WATERING in dry spells, WEEDING and DIGGING with a spade or HOE; MULCHING with a layer of compost or bark to keep moisture in and weeds down; FERTILISER to feed hungry crops; PRUNING, always just above a bud so the new SPROUT grows in the right direction; REPOTTING plants that have outgrown their pots; and tying climbers to a TRELLIS.
POLLEN has to get from flower to flower before most fruit can form, so gardeners plant flowers that bees like near their VEGETABLES. At the end comes the HARVEST. And WELLIES are named after the first Duke of Wellington, who had his bootmaker adapt a style of military boot in the early nineteenth century. Our gardens page covers the wildlife and the soil.