My little apple tree has been a source of pleasure all year and this weekend its season reached its climax with an unusually large amount of bright red fruit ready for picking here in my Lewes, UK, garden.

This is a French variety of dessert apple called Croquella which is grown as a miniature tree and which works well in my small urban garden. Not only are its fruits like Christmas tree decorations from summer to autumn but the blossom is one of my favourite flowers. This is what it looked like in April this year.

In 2014 it didn’t blossom at all and there was no fruit last year so I was doubly pleased to so it in bloom this time round in the seventh year since I planted the tree as a tiny sapling.

For a moment, this weekend, I regretted that the time for picking had arrived because these little red balls have been so decorous out there in my garden.

Harvest-time has its own imperatives and I followed its orders on a lovely sunny weekend.

It always amazes me how much fruit is produced by this plucky little tree but this year has seen a bumper crop.

With the apples picked and stored, my garden has lost one of its seasonal highlights but the dahlias and heliotropes continue their autumnal starring role.

The passion flower too continues not only to flower but to fruit.

I wasn’t expecting this extra fruit harvest but the passion fruits taste delicious.

I’ve still got Bramley cooking apples ripening on the espalier tree too. So it’s been a successful season for fruitfulness.

These Croquella apples don’t just have pretty faces – they taste good too.

Juicy and sweet without being too sweet – just how you want an early season apple.

Some of these Croquella apples made it into a splendid and traditional harvest feast of roast pork on Saturday.

Some more of them are now sitting in the kitchen fruit bowl and the rest are stored in the garden shed – my harvest is definitely home.

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On a grey day in Lewes, I was cheered by my small apple tree deciding to sprout lily flowers as well as a good potential harvest of rosy little apples. Was it magic or was it one of my lilies hitching a lift up to the light?

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My small apple tree here in my Lewes garden has finally offered up these deliciously tempting fruits as August and Summer begins to wave us goodbye. The fruit, variety Croquella, is an early herald for Autumn and its rosiness tempers my regret for season’s end especially after this very disappointing English Summer.

A week ago, I was celebrating Summer at an alfresco dinner party in the countryside only a couple of miles from here. My indulgent friends insisted on me doing an impromptu poetry reading around the camp fire and this is one of the poems I read – I wrote it in 2009 and it was published in The Blotter magazine of November that year when my health was much frailer than it is today. It was originally written for a poetry exhibition on the subject of good and evil:

The Tale Of An Apple And A Sausage

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My garden has had a change of mood since I went away for the weekend – lilies and apples, exotic fruition and a few welcome hints of high summer.

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Yesterday was my birthday, mine and Bruce Springsteen’s, so it seemed appropriate somehow to harvest my Bramley Seedling cooking apples…well I am sure Bruce would appreciate a good apple pie – I know I do and my little Bramley espalier tree, planted last year, was ready to offer up its first crop.

They are the best apples for apple pies and I was really pleased to get a bucket full of them this year.

Sad though to denude the little tree when it was looking so perfectly decorated with fruit.

The apples were in good condition and one hundred percent insect and caterpillar free.

There were enough for two pies…one for today as a birthday treat and the other will freeze until Christmas.

Here is the first pie……

…it tasted just about perfect especially with a dollop of clotted cream. Pity Bruce missed out.

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I took this picture of my Bramley’s Seedling apple tree just before I went off on holiday a few weeks ago feeling hopeful that my first attempt at growing an espalier fruit tree would succeed as, in its second year in my garden, it was showing serious signs of producing a proper crop of cooking apples. Espalier trees, in case you don’t know, are pruned so that they send their branches out sideways restricting their height and they are thus ideal for my small town garden in Lewes in Southern England and ideal too, for someone who is mildly obsessive about pruning.

When I got back home from the remarkably hotter climates of Sicily and America, I was a bit depressed by the boringly dull and gloomy English July and began to wonder why I bothered staying here. Temperate climates never quite reach the glamourously hot temperatures of our holiday destinations and I felt more than a little bored huddled up in my study looking out at clouds and rain. It was the sight of my Bramley’s Seedling tree that cheered me up. The fruit had grown considerably and was beginning to show that delightfully shy blush on its cheek that marks the beginning of its slow ripening process. The apples will not be fully ripe until sometime in October, or even November after mellowing in England’s hopefully gentle August sun and golden and very temperate Autumn. It was this thought that reconciled me to this country’s highly variable climate.

There is a good chance, if you don’t live in the UK, that you will be unfamiliar with this very English phenomenon, the big, bitter tasting cooking apple that, when cooked, goes all fluffy and makes the most perfect of apple pies. Apparently it is hardly grown anywhere else  – some in Canada, I am told and maybe in some parts of the USA. The English climate is ideal for them here even if it is not always ideal for this sun-loving but fair-skinned Englishman.

The first Bramley’s Seedling tree grew from pips planted early in the 19th Century by someone called Mary Ann Brailsford who, far from being a horticulturist, was just a young child playing in her garden in the village of Southwell in Nottinghamshire. That was in 1809.The tree thrived in that garden and when the cottage was bought by a local butcher, Matthew Bramley in 1846, Mary Ann Brailsford disappeared from view leaving Mr Bramley to have his name immortalised. In 1856, a local nurseryman, Henry Merryweather asked if he could take cuttings from the tree seeing the quality of its apples. Bramley agreed but only if the apples should bear his name. Poor Mary Ann Brailsford, it is too late now to call Bramleys, Brailsfords.

I have been watching mine with growing enthusiasm from the time they were mere fruitlets…I hope Mary Ann got as much pleasure form her’s.

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