Granny Smith

History

Maria Ann Smith, born Sherwood in Sussex, reached Sydney with her husband Thomas and their children in 1838; in the mid-1850s Thomas bought land for an orchard on the edge of the Field of Mars common, now Eastwood¹. In what the Australian Dictionary of Biography calls the earliest and most authoritative account, published by the local historian Herbert Rumsey in 1924, a grower remembered that in 1868 Mrs Smith showed him and his father a seedling apple by a creek on her land, which she said had come up from the remains of French crab-apples grown in Tasmania^1,3. She worked a few trees from it, and the orchardist Edward Gallard planted many more and marketed their fruit until 1914¹. Maria Smith died on 9 March 1870, before the apple was grown commercially¹.

By 1891–92 “Granny Smith’s seedlings” were winning prizes as cooking apples, and in 1895 they were planted on a large scale at the government experimental station at Bathurst and added to the New South Wales list of fruit suitable for export¹. Planting grew from the 1920s: by 1975 Granny Smith made up 39 per cent of Australia’s apple production, a share it still held in 1990/91². In New Zealand, which approved it for export in 1923, it was the leading apple in the decade to 1994, with about 40 per cent of the crop². North America and Europe planted it widely only from the 1970s, once imports from the southern hemisphere had made it popular². In 2024/25 it supplied 10 per cent of the US crop, third after Gala and Red Delicious, and 3 per cent of Europe’s⁸.

The fruit

The fruit is medium-sized and round-conical; its bright green skin turns greenish yellow as it ripens, is unstriped, can show many large lenticel dots, and becomes greasy when very ripe². The flesh is greenish white, firm, rather coarse and juicy, with a subacid, refreshing taste^2,4. Its acidity is high, 0.8 to 1.2 per cent malic acid, and buyers expect it fully green, without a red blush⁷.

It ripens late: about 180 days after full bloom, in October and November, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and in April and May in New Zealand². It keeps three to four months in cold air storage and ten to eleven in controlled atmosphere, but is very prone to superficial scald and sensitive to carbon dioxide⁷.

Growing

The tree is vigorous⁵ and partly self-sterile, so it needs pollinating varieties nearby; it can slip into bearing in alternate years². The USDA germplasm record, citing a 1992–93 nursery catalogue, gives a chilling requirement of 500 to 600 hours⁵.

Uses

Granny Smith first made its name as a cooking apple¹; Warrington describes a versatile apple, valued for both eating fresh and cooking². In the United States, 77 per cent of the crop went to the fresh market on average in 2020–2024⁸.

Where the sources disagree

• How the seedling arose. Against the 1924 account of a seedling by the creek¹, Maria Smith’s grandson Benjamin Spurway said she baked the Tasmanian apples in a pie and sowed their seeds outside her kitchen window; Warrington thought his the most authentic and plausible version². Her descendants have disputed the circumstances from time to time¹.
• Its parents. Tradition makes it a seedling of French Crab^1,2, and the National Fruit Collection and the USDA germplasm record still give French Crab as the known parent^4,5; Warrington wrote in 1994 that the true parentage could not be confirmed². A 2025 SNP study identified Ortley as one parent, the other being unknown⁶. The DNA evidence is the better supported.