In search of the golden apple

Sometime around 1986-87 a friend took me to visit the allotments on Sprowston Road, just above Mousehold Heath in Norwich. They were normal, well-worked allotments, each with a fruit tree, which weren’t allowed on my allotment near Bungay. However, what I remember was that on leaving the Sprowston Road allotments, there was a large heap of apples on the ground. I had to try one and liking what I tasted, pocketed some more.

In my memory the flavour was wonderful, and the shape regular, but what was even more attractive was the bright yellow skin which was also pleasingly rough to the touch. To my mind they were like a vision or epitome of an apple, maybe even a mythical apple. Sure enough golden apples have featured heavily in mythology - Greek mythology in particular, among which is the story of Melanion and Atalanta: Melanion asks Aphrodite for help to outrun the beautiful and fleet-footed Atalanta in a race, and she gives him three golden apples to throw in her path to distract her and so win her hand. In several European fairy tales there is often a bird who steals golden apples from a king. W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The song of wandering Aengus’, exploring similar mythical territory, invokes “the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun”.

Several years after this, when I was choosing the apple varieties I wanted to plant in my newly established orchard, I became obsessed with finding this variety; but despite drawing up lists of likely candidates and looking them up in books, I didn’t find it. In the meantime I often come across references to some yellow-skinned variety, and have to check just in case, but the photo is not yellow enough or too shiny. I know I must visit the National Fruit Collection in Kent in autumn and go up and down the rows, and maybe finally track it down, but I’m not really sure I’d find it.