Kent

How apples came

Fruit has been grown on the North Kent Plain since the thirteenth century, for the London market close by, and its orchards grew larger from the seventeenth century³. William Lambarde, who wrote his survey of the county in 1570, knew no part of the realm with orchards of apples and gardens of cherries in such number, “or with such arte and industrie, set and planted”. He found Kent milder than Northumberland and almost as warm as Cornwall, and noted that in the Weald people had lately drunk much “pomage, or cider for want of barley”¹.

Lambarde traced the orchards to one man. Richard Harris, fruiterer to Henry VIII, saw that England, whose sun and soil could make good apples, was supplied chiefly from abroad, and that the trees once brought from Normandy had degenerated. About 1533 he took some 42 hectares at Teynham, called the Brennet, divided them into ten parcels and planted them with trees brought “from beyonde the Seas”: “the sweet Cherry, the temperate Pipyn, and the golden Renate”, in rows so even that they seemed “drawen thorow one Mould”. Teynham and thirty other parishes along the road from Rainham to Blean Wood were, Lambarde wrote, “the Cherrie gardein, and Apple orcharde of Kent”, and Teynham “the parent of all the rest”².

By the parliamentary returns Kent had about 5,300 ha of orchard in 1877 and about 7,050 ha in 1883, the fourth largest area of any English county after Herefordshire, Devon and Somerset⁴. Its nurseries sold Kentish apples: Gascoyne’s Scarlet, raised by a Mr Gascoyne at Bapchild Court near Sittingbourne, was introduced in 1871 by G. Bunyard & Co. of Maidstone⁵. In 1913, with the backing of local fruit growers, the “East Malling and Wye Fruit Experimental Station” opened at East Malling; it became independent in 1920, was known as East Malling Research Station for 65 years, and has been part of Niab since 2016⁶.

How they’re grown

The North Kent Plain is open, low country, predominantly of high-quality, fertile loams. Its orchards and other horticultural crops, mostly in the centre and east and often enclosed by belts of poplar or alder, are why Kent is called “the Garden of England”³.

East Malling’s first great work was on rootstocks. In November 1912 its director, R. Wellington, began gathering the dwarfing “Paradise” stocks sold by nurseries in Britain and abroad, which came under a confusion of names; when he joined the forces in August 1914, R. G. Hatton carried on. They dropped the trade names, sorted out nine recurring types and numbered them I to IX. Type IX was the Paradis Jaune de Metz, then only recently introduced into England⁷. As Malling IX, or M.9, it has become the most widely planted dwarfing apple rootstock in the world⁸. The station also bred apples, among them Malling Kent, raised there by H. M. Tydeman in 1949⁹.

The National Fruit Collection, begun in 1922 by the Ministry of Agriculture with the Royal Horticultural Society, marked its seventieth year at Brogdale Farm in 2022, and the University of Reading has curated it for Defra since 2008. It holds about 3,500 cultivars of tree fruit, each as a pair of trees¹⁰; its online index lists 2,105 apples¹¹. DNA fingerprints of more than 3,000 trees from local collections, made at East Malling, have been compared with its records¹⁰.

In 2022 the National Trust found that Kent had more orchard than any other English county, and that it was one of only three counties with more orchard than a century before, because of modern planting¹².

What’s picked

Defra no longer reports Kent as one county, but its four Kent areas had 6,769 ha of orchard fruit (the June survey’s “top fruit”) on commercial holdings in June 2025, about 39% of England’s 17,217 ha; the area Defra calls Kent Thames Gateway alone had 3,294 ha. In 2010 the county had 8,757 ha¹³.

Defra last surveyed varieties in 2012, and then only by region. In the South East and London, where Kent held about 80% of the orchard fruit in 2016¹³, the largest plantings in 2012 were Bramley’s Seedling (1,326 ha), Cox (1,261 ha), Gala (1,056 ha) and Braeburn (459 ha), followed by Egremont Russet, Jonagold, Scifresh and Discovery¹⁴. Across the United Kingdom Gala has since pulled far ahead: it covered 2,719 ha in 2025 and gave about 120,000 tonnes, while Cox’s Orange Pippin shrank from 1,239 ha in 2018 to 477 ha¹⁵.

The 2025 season, after a hot summer, ran early. Cooking apples were picked for the fresh market from late July and, as much as a fortnight before the usual time, for storage from mid-August; Gala was picked from early September to October, again about two weeks ahead, most orchards more than once¹⁵. At Brogdale, Gascoyne’s Scarlet is picked in late September and Malling Kent in mid-October^5,9.

On the table

Kent’s orchards grow apples for eating and for cooking, and the cooking apple Bramley’s Seedling had the largest area of any variety in the South East in 2012¹⁴. Its cider is pressed from the same kind of fruit: the specification for Herefordshire Cider sets the tannic cider apples of the west against the “culinary fruit such as is used for cider making in the East and South East of England”¹⁷.

The Kentish dialect had apple words of its own. Parish and Shaw’s dictionary of 1888 records scrump, in north Kent “a stunted, badly-grown apple” (“This orchard isn’t worth much, one sieve out of every four ‘ull be scrumps”); goff, “the commonest kind of apple”; and granada, a golden pippin. Apples and pears were “hard fruit”, and in Kent an orchard had to be called an apple orchard or a cherry orchard, because the county had both¹⁶.

Each October Brogdale holds an apple fair, with tastings, picking in the orchards, cooking demonstrations, juicing for children and tours of the National Fruit Collection¹⁸.

Notes

• Kent’s orchard area grew by about a third between 1877 and 1883, faster than that of any of the other five counties at the head of the returns⁴.
• East Malling’s first director defined its task as “the study of problems met with in the actual culture of fruit trees and bushes”⁶.
• Hatton kept numbers for the Paradise types partly because at least three of them had no recognised name⁷.
• The National Fruit Collection keeps every cultivar as a pair of trees¹⁰.

Where the sources disagree

• Kent’s area. Defra reports Kent in four parts, Kent Thames Gateway and East, Mid and West Kent; the 6,769 ha is their sum, without Medway’s 226 ha, and the shares of 39% and 80% are calculations from the same tables¹³.
• Varieties. No variety figures for Kent were found; those given are for the South East and London in 2012¹⁴ and the whole United Kingdom in 2025¹⁵, and the list at the top follows them.
• Harvest months. The calendar is national, from 2025, an early year¹⁵; Brogdale’s picking times are for its own trees^5,9. No Kent harvest calendar was found.
• The origin of M.9. The Extension Foundation says it was selected in England from Jaune de Metz stocks “in the late 1800s”⁸; Hatton’s report of 1917 calls the Jaune de Metz a recent arrival in England and describes its numbering at East Malling⁷.
• Lambarde’s text. The Teynham passage was read in the edition of 1826, which follows Lambarde’s last revision rather than the first edition of 1576; the 42 ha is converted from his imperial figure².
• The move to Brogdale. Reading’s curator says only that 2022 was the collection’s seventieth year there¹⁰; the year of the move and the earlier home were not checked in a primary record.