Apple varieties for the future

Here in the South West of England we are seeing the effects of climate change on many plants. Like all of Europe, our winters are getting warmer very rapidly, however here this means we will soon be approaching subtropical conditions, where winter temperatures don’t go below -1°C, much faster than the rest of the UK.

Some of the effects we’re seeing could be beneficial – eg. wild strawberry species are now becoming evergreen in many winters, so they are more efficient ground cover.

However in our oldest forest garden in Dartington we planted mainly old Devon varieties of apple. These were originally selected 100-150 years ago or so, when the Devon climate was rather different than it is now. One of the things that makes an apple variety well suited to the locality is that it gets the right amount of winter cold (measured in chilling hours (that is hours under 7°C through the winter). If apple trees don’t get enough chilling then flowering in spring becomes erratic, fruit set declines and they gradually become less and less productive. In fact around here many older varieties have flowered a second time in September in the last few years which also affects productivity.

Reinette Gris du Canada

We’ve lost a lot of the chilling (over 50%) that Devon had when the old Devon varieties were selected. We have a different climate now – the climate of mid West France from 60 years ago. And the obvious conclusion is that here we should be growing French varieties rather than old Devon ones (and Devon varieties would be much more useful further North, eg. in North West Wales).

So I’ve been looking into which French varieties to start growing. Those from the West of France should have more resistance to canker and scab disease which is a factor in our humid climate here. But how for North and South to look? I have ended up choosing varieties from all down the West side of France from Normandy to Bordeaux – diversity is good! From a long list which took a while to compile from various French sources I have narrowed it down to those where propagating material is already available in the UK (Mainly at the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale.) The realities of Brexit mean that importing propagating material from the EU is a logistical nightmare so I wanted to avoid that.

The varieties I’ve chosen and which we’ll start propagating this winter are:

Api Noir

We will cleft graft to our mature trees to change varieties to these French ones next spring (doing several varieties per tree) which should give some results quite quickly. And we’ll also start grafting to rootstocks to offer trees to our nursery customers in a “varieties for climate change” listing in the future.

There’s no point having a romantic attachment to local varieties in an era of rapid climate change, it just doesn’t make sense. We’re going to have to adapt to the changing climate as best we can …….