Fruit Collections

The apple collection at West Dean is housed within and around the recently restored Victorian walled kitchen garden. In its heyday, at the turn of the century, this area would have been the furiously active 'engine room' for driving the whole of the extensive gardens operation.

Fruit was a very important part of the kitchen garden economy with a wide variety of different fruits being produced at all times of the year utilising the 'forcing' capacity of the glasshouses and frames. Pineapples, figs, peaches, nectarines, grapes, cherries, plums, soft fruit, pears and apples were all grown to perfection, polished prepared and taken to the great house to be served and discussed with all the pomp and reverence reserved for the finest wines and cigars.

However, this fructuous cornucopia was considered to reach its pinnacle in that quintessentially English fruit, the Apple, which gained a status in the British Isles that it has never achieved elsewhere. This pomological prejudice is given perfect expression in Edward Bunyard's 'Anatomy of Dessert' where he says 'No fruit is more to our English taste than the Apple. Let the Frenchman have his Pear, the Italian his Fig, the Jamaican may retain his farinaceous Banana and the Malay his Durian, but for us the Apple.'

This nineteenth century mania for the apple reached it zenith with the 1883 National Apple Congress held in the Great Vinery of the Chiswick Gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society. Its aim was to resolve the confusion of identities which had developed and to select a good range of apples for commercial growers. However, it was also a triumphant display of the diversity of apples growing throughout the country. There were 10,150 separate dishes of apples, grouped by county and representing 236 different exhibitions and over 1,500 varieties and attracted over 500 visitors a day and had to be kept open an extra week to accommodate all who wished to see it.

Sadly, even as the English Apple enjoyed its heyday, increased competition from imports from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were forcing English growers to concentrate on a handful of good commercial varieties. This left the wealth of varieties once grown commercially to linger on in derelict orchards, declining Estate gardens and in the back gardens of cottages and houses across the country.

Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in old orchards and apple varieties for which much of the credit must go to Common Ground and its national Apple Day initiative, and West Dean's collection can be seen as part of this interest. Our collection has 4 main aims:-

1. To grow any variety that we know was grown at West Dean between 1890 and 1914, Edward James's parents period when the walled garden was at its peak.
2. To grow a wide variety of Victorian varieties, as this is the period of the development of the walled garden.
3. To grow both earlier cultivars and modern, including contemporary, cultivars so as to display as wide a range of varieties as possible.
4. To grow all of these in as many diverse ways as possible including half standards, 4-winged pyramids, goblets, oblique cordons, espaliers, palmette verriers, and cross-bars.

The bulk of the walled garden fruit was planted in the mid-nineties. Rootstocks used were MM106 for half standards and espaliers. M26 for 4-winged pyramids, goblets, espaliers and M9 for oblique cordons.

'There is no fruit in temperate climates so universally esteemed, and so extensively cultivated, nor is there any which is so closely identified with the social habits of the human species as the apple. Apart from the many domestic purposes to which it is applicable, the facility of its cultivation, and its adaptation to almost every latitude, have rendered it, in all ages, an object of special attention and regard.'

Dr. Robert Hogg, The Apple, 1851.

Recommended reading:
'The Book of Apples' by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, Ebury Press, 1993.

'The English Apple' by Rosanne Sanders, Phaidon, 1988.

'Charleston Kedding - A History of Kitchen Gardening' by Susan Campbell, Ebury Press,1996.

West Dean’s celebratory weekend of the apple, the Apple Affair, is on 3 and 4 October.

Apple Affair 3 & 4 October

Visitors can see over 100 varieties of apples grown in the Victorian walled kitchen garden and sample and buy apple based foods and drinks.

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How to Find Us

West Dean College is situated in South East England, six miles north of the historic city of Chichester and 12 miles from the south coast.

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