In 2019, Cornwall-based artists William Arnold and James Fergusson began paying a lot of attention to wild apple trees growing in unique and sometimes unlikely locations around the Cornish countryside. Remarkably, every apple seed is capable of producing an entirely different variety. And it’s this immense genome that inspired the pair to begin their ongoing project called Some Interesting Apples.
Apple cultivars that we often see in supermarkets, like Gala or Honeycrisp, need to be carefully produced in a process called clonal propagation, in which a cutting from a desirable tree is grafted onto a new one, creating, essentially, a copy. Because even if a Honeycrisp seed sprouted and produced a tree, it wouldn’t be another Honeycrisp!
Arnold and Fergusson have discovered more than 600 wild apple varieties throughout Cornwall over the past seven years. Arnold is a photographer and visually documents new types, while the duo revels in finding and sampling the wide array of “feral” varieties that grow along roadsides and in parks across the county. A new short film, produced by Ffern, rounds up some of the duo’s tasting notes.
Rather than giving individual names to hundreds of different apples, some of which are sweet and dessert-like and some of which are almost too tart to bear, Arnold and Fergusson assign them a what3words designation, using the wayfinding app popular in the U.K. that denotes specific places using three random words rather than GPS coordinates or traditional street addresses.
The what3words location for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, is cage.rocks.gladiators. For Some Interesting Apples, the unique codes provide a useful, sometimes absurd, and occasionally poetic way to label different varieties based on where the trees were found, like a “horse wish gossip” apple, or a “bats prefer flame” variety.
In 2023, in collaboration with the University of Exeter and the National Trust, Arnold and Fergusson spearheaded a unique project called The Wilding Mother Orchard, situated near Helford, which has been established with dozens of wild root stocks. The orchard is not only a celebration of the fruit’s natural diversity but also a way of broaching how the effects of the climate crisis may alter our access to varieties we take for granted in the future.
“People get alarmed when they realise that the heritage apple varieties they love might not survive in a climate-changed world,” Arnold told the BBC. “They don’t appreciate that we are surrounded by unique wild apple volunteers that may be better adapted to future conditions.”
See the short film on Vimeo, and check out Arnold’s photographs on his website.
