Bramley's Seedling Apple

Bramley's Seedling has one of the most thoroughly documented origin stories of any apple variety. In 1809, a young girl named Mary Ann Brailsford, living in a cottage in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, England, planted apple pips — by one popular account, taken from an apple her mother was using in a pie — in a pot in the family garden. Mary Ann married and moved away in 1813, and after her parents' deaths the cottage was sold in 1846 to a local butcher, Matthew Bramley, whose name the tree would eventually carry rather than hers. In 1856, a 17-year-old named Henry Merryweather, son of a local nurseryman, encountered a man carrying a basket of unusually fine apples, traced them back to Bramley's tree, and was given permission to take grafting cuttings on the condition that any commercial variety bear the Bramley name. Merryweather began selling grafted trees of "Bramley's Seedling" in 1862. Mary Ann Brailsford herself died in 1852, apparently never knowing her childhood seedling would become one of England's most famous cooking apples. Remarkably, the original tree — over 200 years old, and surviving a lightning strike along the way — was still alive and fruiting in the same Southwell garden as of recent years, cared for for decades by a local resident, Nancy Harrison, until her death in 2014, and has since been studied by university researchers and even tissue-culture cloned to help preserve its genetics. The fruit is large, tart, and high in acid, prized specifically for cooking rather than fresh eating — heating develops a milder flavor and a genuinely distinctive golden, fluffy texture once baked.