Floods you with fascinating facts: Trees A Crowd reviewed

Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s great mysteries for me. Why, when you plant a pip from one type of apple, does it grow into a completely different type of apple tree? The answer — one kind of apple tree will typically cross-pollinate with another variety to pass on a different set of genes — is less interesting than the next bit. Which is that if you do plant, say, a Braeburn seed, and it takes, you’re likely to end up with crab apples.

The reason, as explained on the podcast, is that the wild crab apple of Britain, Malus sylvestris, and Malus sieversii, an apple native to the mountains of Kazakhstan, are the ancestors of almost all domestic apples we eat today. Give your pedigree pip half a chance and it will attempt to revert. Little wonder crab apples have been credited with magical powers.