Apple Varieties Each With a Picture
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Which Variety?
Two factors should be considered when choosing which variety of apple tree is correct for your garden - taste and pollination. Pollination is dealt with in the next section. Taste is largely a matter of personal preference. Your dessert apple preference may be for a sweet and mild apple like Golden Delicious, a sweet and acid apple like Cox's Orange Pippin or an apple which is more acidic like Discovery. Cooking apples vary in their texture between varieties.

The table below summarizes the key differences between those apple varieties which GardenAction recommend for your garden, but click on any variety name for more details and in most cases a picture. The 'rating' takes into account ease of growing (disease resistance, pruning) and fruit quality.

Click here for pictures and descriptions of 50 other apple tree varieties

DESSERT APPLES
Variety	Sweet	Juicy	Flowering Pollination	Rating (4=highest)
Cox's Orange Pippin	Sweet	Juicy	Middle
Discovery	Medium to Acidic	V. Juicy	Middle
Egremont Russet	Sweet	Dry	Early
Fiesta	Sweet	Juicy	Middle
Fortune	Sweet	Juicy	Middle
Greensleeves	Medium	Juicy	Early
Idared	Medium	Medium	Early
James Grieve	Medium	Juicy	Middle
Jonagold	Sweet	V. juicy	Middle
Jupiter	Sweet	Juicy	Middle
Worcester Permain	Sweet	Dry	Mid/late
COOKING APPLES
Variety	Sweet	Juicy	Flowering	Rating (4=maximum)
Grenadier	Acid	Juicy	Middle
Monarch	Acid	Medium	Middle
Rev. W. Wilks	Acid	Juicy	Early

We recently visited Hill Close Gardens in Warwick which has a variety of lesser known Victorian apple trees. It's worth a visit with the entrance fee only being �3.

Pollination of Apple Trees
Pollination is the method by which apple blossom receives pollen from another variety and goes on to produce an apple. Ignoring much of the advice in many gardening books, magazines and television programs, many gardeners successfully grow a single apple tree in their gardens. Why do they succeed - the answer is the very mobile bee. Bees will fly literally miles to find the best source of pollen and in this way, a single apple tree can easily be pollinated by an apple tree a mile or more away.

So, if you live in a reasonably populated area, you can be almost certain that your single apple tree will be pollinated successfully by your neighbour's apple trees. If you try a single apple tree in your garden and it is not pollinated for some reason, the solution is to buy a partially trained cordon or espalier tree later, and this will ensure pollination whilst taking up very little room.

In less populated areas, or those with few surrounding gardens, it is best to plant apple trees in groups of two or more varieties which flower at about the same time. Consult the table on each variety above (see the column flowering / pollination), and you can be certain that where the flowering periods of two varieties match (early, middle or late), they will pollinate each other. Remember too, that many of the ornamental crab apple trees (John Downie and Malus Hillieri for example) make very good pollinating partners.

Click here for a page that lists which varieties can pollinate each other.

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Apple Varieties Each With a Picture (continued - 3)

Apple Varieties Each With a Picture
(continued - 3)