Apple blossom time is one of the sweetest moments in the gardening year, and planting an apple tree or two will sustain bees, attract all manner of insects, give the birds somewhere to perch and supply some food as well. Cooking apples can be a kitchen staple and this year marks the 200th birthday of the Bramley Seedling – officially celebrated on February 1. Despite its age, no other apple cooks as well as Bramley and luckily it suits the supermarket, having a tough waxy skin and good storage qualities.

The first tree was grown from pips planted by a child called Mary Ann Brailsford in 1809. She was from Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, and she planted the seedlings in her garden at Church Cottage.

Matthew Bramley bought the cottage in 1846 and it was while he lived there that Henry Merryweather, a local nurseryman, came across the apples and asked to grow the trees commercially. The original tree continues to bear fruit to this day and every tree grown has come from scion wood that originated from that one seedling.

There’s a Bramley Apple pub in Church Street and just about everything in Church Street honours the Bramley. Those pips, planted 200 years ago by Miss Brailsford, are responsible for what is now a £50m industry with some 80,000 tonnes sold each year world wide. There’s even a website (www.bramleyapples.co.uk).

Yet Bramleys are large, upright ‘triploid’ trees that flower late.Their pollen is self sterile (which means that they need two partners to produce fruit) and they have a tendency to be biennial – cropping heavily every other year.

Despite all the negatives, most us would still aspire to have a Bramley in our gardens. Think of all those pies!Yet when Thomas Hogg wrote his Fruit Manual in 1884 he devoted a mere paragraph to the Bramley Seedling.

But he wrote at length about the ‘Blenheim Pippin’ also known as ‘Blenheim Orange’, ‘Woodstock Pippin’, ‘Northwick Pippin’ and ‘Kempster’s Pippin’. This older cooker/dessert apple is said to perfect for Apple Charlotte. Trees were already being sold widely by 1818, although some Worcester nurseries were advertising it by 1807 two years before the Bramley seeds were even sown. The tree acquired the name ‘Blenheim’ in 1811, before that it was known as ‘Kempster’s Pippin’.

An issue of The Gardeners’ Chronicle ( from the mid 19th century) describes the original tree “in a somewhat dilapidated corner of the decaying borough of Woodstock” and places it ten yards away from the Blenheim Park wall. By then it was in a poor state. But Old Grimmett, a basket maker, remembers that “thousands thronged from all parts to gaze upon its ruddy, ripening orange burden” and gardeners came to the garden of George Kempster to select scion wood to graft on to their trees. George Kempster died in 1773. But the tree dates from 1740 and the first cottage after the Mill in Manor Road has a plaque recording the raising of the first Blenheim Orange Apple.

Blenheim Pippin is another late-flowering, self-sterile triploid. But the fruit does not transport well, being too thin-skinned and soft-fleshed. But I planted one three years ago in the hope of making an Apple Charlotte some ten or 20 years hence. After all, the ‘Blenheim Pippin’ is 100 years older than the young impostor from Nottinghamshire – the ‘Bramley Seedling’.