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apples that we grow for fruit today come from grafted stock because apple trees grown from seeds will, almost always, taste sour enough to scour the enamel from your teeth. However, and this is the point, they will make darn good cider. Perfectly

This time of year the crab apples are at their most impressive: the trees are laden with little yellow or red apples that hang on until long after the last leaves have fallen. These are really useful smallish trees, not just for their colourful

in 1840. Obviously these things need time to grow and fruit so we then have a hiatus until 1857. On October 24th that year the RHS held their Grand Fruit Exhibition and, according to the report:"In the class of single dishes of dessert apple the first

, it's the apples and pears that have been the subject of my attentions. As we know, apple trees blossom picturesquely in spring. These flowers then develop into small fruits and then, in June, the tree shrugs and loses a fair few of these (this

to the sweet pea.The best I can find is a cowboy song that was a hit in 1966 "Sweet pea / Apple of my eye /  Don't know when and I don't know why". Nice but not exactly horticulturally relevant.*Anyway, sweet peas are flowering now. Lathyrus odoratus

Good morning and happy 'Grow Your Own' Week to you all.There are, I have to admit, many other gardeners who are hotter on vegetable growing than me. Give me herbaceous borders and I can muddle through and make them look pretty good, but when

.)Malus 'Red Sentinel': one of the finest crab apples with sensational autumn colour and jewelled clusters of small red apples that cling on long after the leaves have fallen. The blossom is a fine pinky reddy white in spring.Acer davidii, the snake bark maple

at RHS Garden Rosemoor, growing on the edge of a pond. It is well worth a trip to these lovely gardens in Devon to see it (and at this time of year there is the bonus of watching the apple harvest there.)I first saw Gunnera manicata when I was a small boy

It's blackberry time - not those machines, without which many "suits" would feel emasculated, but fat berries swollen by rain and aching for crumble. The blackberry bramble is a weed, and the perfect example of a plant simply growing in the wrong

: there seems little point in weeding much (the nights are too cold for most annual weeds to bother with seeding themselves), why bother to tie back a sprawling plant when you are going to cut them all down anyway soon? Even the grass stops growing quite