Grafting for apples

Toby tackles a tempting top-grafting project, which involves perching precariously over a busy A-road…

- Toby Buckland

JUST as the mountaineer Edmund Hillary risked all on the remote slopes of Everest, I braved the perilous overgrown incline of the busy A379 ‘because it was there’. While Hillary wanted to conquer his hill, my aim was to lay claim to something growing atop the gorse-choked gradient – cuttings from a fruit-laden apple tree that even now has its harvest of golden baubles hanging from its branches.

Fruit trees growing by busy roads are common, and you don’t need to be Poirot to know that they come from the millions of unwanted cores, thrown from car windows when no-one is looking. Most road-side seedlings are flavourless shadows of the parent ‘Braeburn’, ‘Cox’ or ‘Jazz’ cores they came from, but once in blue moon a pip chucked from a passing Porsche or Puddle Jumper produces a tasty new variety.