This is a picture of an apple tree beside the railway line at Three Bridges Station in West Sussex taken in April 2008. A small tree with branches cascading down the railway bank it was covered in apples in April and May. The tree flowered in April. The apples in the sun were beginning to turn from green to brown and the ones in the shade were still green and conical in shape. All the other trees along this line between the Sussex Coast and London had long since dropped their crops, but this small tree had several hundred fruits on it with just a few beginning to fall. It seems astonishing that the fruits were still on the tree in May.
Ian Harrison
Ian showed me some of the apples from this tree – they had the air of a Golden Delicious seedling and coincidentally were similar to the fruit on an apple tree growing beside Wye Station in Kent. These apples hangs on the tree until after Christmas but not until May! Both the result, perhaps, of all those Golden Delicious apple cores we have thrown out of windows and over fences since the 1970s when they began to flood in from France.