Apple Day Bonus Episode

Dennis Smith in the walled Gardens at Burghley

This week Bill, my ‘American Podcast Marketing Associate’, landed in London. Bill is a very old friend who you might recall from one of the first Blog posts, almost a year ago. When I left the BBC he gave me some very wise advice: ‘never retire, follow your heart as well as your head and start by taking a new path‘. 12 months on and I feel I am well and truly on a new path. Very appropriately Bill and I met this week in a garden! I know there are several of you who receive this weekly email who were amongst the first people to give me, like Bill, feedback and encouragement on the blog idea and the initial episodes. THANK YOU - I hope you still enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.

I’m excited today to be publishing something new - a short bonus episode to celebrate the fact that tomorrow is the UK’s National Apple Day.

I’m including the episode page text in today’s blog and if you want to see more photographs do click here to see them on that page.

According to the charity - The Orchard Project, there are 2500 varieties of apples in the UK. They have calculated that you could, if you could find them, eat a different variety of apple every day for six years!

I made this short bonus episode to celebrate the UK’s National Apple Day on the 21st October. First held at the old apple market in Covent Garden in 1990, and inspired by the charity Common Ground, it seemed an appropriate moment to mark the apple journey we have shared on Our Plant Stories. If you have been following you will know that the Peasgood’s nonsuch apple has a wonderful story and Denis Smith who I met in the walled garden at Burghley House recently, had some more information to share. I love that his visit to an apple day, twenty years ago, has given him such a passion for the subject and a desire to search for lost apple varieties. I’ve heard we might find some of them in New Zealand so if we have any New Zealand listeners who can shed more light on that, I would love to hear from you.

If you do visit an apple day or just find yourself searching for something a little different to a Granny Smith or a Pink Lady this autumn then I hope you too will start to follow some of these wonderful stories. Perhaps this should be the first mention of a possible Christmas present for someone who shows an interest, The New Book of Apples by Joan Morgan or maybe you could buy someone an apple tree - check out Richard Borries Orange Pippin website for some inspiration. Though beware - he was bought one tree and ended up developing an entire website - as he himself put it: ‘it kind of got out of hand’!

I’m still hoping to taste a Peasgood’s nonsuch, Andy Peasgood did rave about the apple pies his grandmother made but hey if not this year, next year.

Next week I shall return to working on the programmes for the new series of Our Plant Stories that begins in January and we have some beautiful stories. If you want to support the new work you can do so by buying me a coffee here - I promise not to spend it on coffee or plants!