Crispy, juicy and sometimes tart, the apple is a favourite fruit with a long and fascinating history.
It can be traced back thousands of years to Central Asia where the wild apple tree (Malus sieversii) still grows today. These wild apples were nothing like the cultivated varieties we now enjoy — they were small, often bitter and generally not very appetising.
Despite this, humans began to gather and cultivate them, naturally selecting over centuries to better suit their taste buds.
Around 1300 BCE, Egyptians cultivated apples along the Nile river and by 800 BCE the Romans and Greeks were growing them, too. Some evidence suggests they’d learnt grafting techniques as well.
By 200 BCE, apples had arrived in England and in the 16th and 17th centuries the Spanish took them to
