As showing how conservative is the popular demand for apples, Cox’s Orange Pippin, which is absolutely unapproached for flavour, and is perfectly sound and eatable from early in November till Easter if carefully picked at the right moment and properly stored, was cultivated thirty or forty years before the British public discovered its extraordinary qualities!  I find it described as one of the best dessert apples in Dr. Hogg’s Fruit Manual, and my copy is the third edition published in 1866, so it must have been well known to him some years previously, though we never heard much about it until after the twentieth century came in.  Though the colour, when well grown, is highly attractive to the connoisseur, the ordinary buyer did not readily take to it as it is rather small.  In 1917 Cox’s Orange Pippin, however, really came into its own; I myself, here in the New Forest, grew over 3,000 pounds on about 120 trees planted in 1906, each branch pruned as a cordon, and very thinly dispersed, and the trees restricted to a height of about 14 feet.  The apples were mostly sold in Covent Garden at 6d. a pound, clear of railway carriage and salesmen’s commission.  In 1918, a year of great scarcity, these apples were selling in the London shops up to 3s. 6d. apiece!  Now that its reputation is fully established, it is likely to be many years before it becomes relatively low in price, as the foreign apples of this kind cannot compare in flavour with those grown in our own orchards.  I appreciate the man whose attention was wholly given to some particularly dainty dish, and, being bored at the table by a persistent talker, gently said, “Hush! and let me listen to the flavour.”

As an early market apple there is none more popular than the Worcester Pearmain, first grown in the early eighties by Messrs. R. Smith and Co., of Worcester, and said to be a cross between King of the Pippins and the old Quarrenden (nearly always called Quarantine).  It is a most attractive fruit—­brilliant in colour, medium size, with pleasant brisk flavour—­and is an early and regular bearer.  I recognized its possibilities as soon as I saw it, and getting all the grafts I could collect, and they were very scarce at the time, I had the branches of some of my old worthless trees cut off, and set my old grafter to convert them into Worcester Pearmains; they soon came into bearing and produced abundant and profitable crops.

This apple is not much use for keeping beyond a month or so, as it soon loses its crisp texture and distinctive flavour, and it is its earliness and colour that makes it so popular in its season.  Its regularity as a bearer is due to its early maturity; it can be picked in August, which allows plenty of time, in favourable weather, for next year’s fruit buds to develop before winter; whereas with the late sorts these buds have very little chance to mature while the current year’s fruit is ripening, with the result that a blank season nearly always follows an abundant yield.  The Worcester Pearmain is so highly decorative, with its large pale pink and white blossoms in spring and its glowing red fruit in autumn, that it would be worth growing for these qualities alone in the amateur’s garden, and in any case it is an apple that nobody should be without.