Apples, eating apples, that is, not cookers, come to you in many supermarkets in two versions: one pure green, the other mostly red, and they have one thing in common - they are both hard as the hob of hell. Are they refrigerated before they are fully ripe? Or is that the way they are by nature? As to taste? That hardly enters into it. They are apples; what more do you want? One dealer, asked if he had any local Irish apples, replied that people didn't buy them. Believe that if you like. We all know that Armagh grows splendid fruit. You may think that apple-growing on a big scale was introduced by English arrivals a few hundred years ago. Peadar Mac Neice of the Orchard Trust, Portadown, claims that apple-growing is a local long-standing tradition, and his belief has been confirmed, according to a fascinating article by Tom Kennedy in the current issue of Ireland of the Welcomes. For excavations at Emain Macha uncovered an apple which, as it is colourfully put, "was already more than a thousand years old before Saint Patrick is said to have planted his own tree in Ceangoba".
Dr Jim Mallory of QUB was working on the lowest and therefore oldest level of the fortress, when he came on a shrivelled but clearly recognisable apple. It came out from a ditch, stuck neatly at the end of a shovel. He remains astonished that something so delicate could have survived intact for so long. And at Oxford, Dr Barrie Juniper is examining the genetic code. Rings cut even from the relatively sour and puny crab seem to have been a delicacy throughout the ancient world. They have been found in previous historic burial sites.
Meanwhile, at UCD, Professor Michael Hennerty is following in the tracks of his predecessor Professor J. G. Lamb in bringing back into cultivation many varieties of apple which were near the point of extinction. Did you ever hear of Bloody Butcher, Irish Peach, Dockrey, Summer John, Lady's Finger? As varieties are found or refound rather, bud-wood cuttings are grafted onto vigorous root stock. The first fruits can be picked in three years! Some of these varieties are bigger than the modern average.
And, surprise, many of these, from a pre-pesticide past, often remain disease-free. Read also about Armagh Orchard Trust, on which, perhaps, more another day.