Your own apple variety

Would you like to own and name your own new apple variety? We are offering the opportunity to become the legal owner of a brand new high quality apple variety, which you are then free to name and commercialise as you wish.

The apple varieties we offer are all developed by ourselves in our own small scale apple-breeding programme. Most commerical breeding programmes focus on producing the next Braeburn or Gala driven by supermarket supply chain demands, we are not solely concerned with characteristics such as storage potential, colour, firmness and uniformity- our new varieties are raised for the apple loving British gardener, we are free to improve the things we value most in apples such as flavour, texture, appearance and increasing the apple season length. The goal of the breeding programme is to refresh and renew our favourite varieties, adding depth to the options British gardeners have for the future. Most of all it is fun and exciting to be a part of the ongoing story of the apple and this is a great way to leave your personal mark on it for ever!  

How does it work?

Simply, each seed contained in every apple will grow into a tree which will produce unique fruits which will in some ways might be similar to it's pollen and seed parents. If you hand pollinate 'Cox's Orange Pippin' pollen onto a marked 'Golden Delicious' flower the seeds contained inside that 'Golden Delicious' fruit may be grown into a tree which you will hope has some of the flavour of Cox and some of the texture of Golden Delicious. Apple breeding results are often very variable so you are never certain what your seedling's fruits will be like until your seedling has reached maturity and fruited, which at best will be around 5 years after germination. Even if you perform the same cross over and over again it is a genetic lottery, you will create a huge variation of new seedling varieties. Some will be very good, the majority will be worse than parent. Breeding requires a lot of patience, assessment and attention to small detail.

The varieties we are offering to the public to buy and name are listed with their nursery seedling number alongside photos and a brief description. All the new varieties we offer in this programme have met our nursery manager's personal quality and flavour assessment - seedlings which we don't think taste good enough are weeded out each season. This means that any new seedling variety you choose to buy will have a record of good characteristics and performance and are in the nursery manager's opinion comparable to the best available cultivars of fresh dessert apples. The nursery manger plants and trials hundreds of new potential seedling varieties each season and compiles data on the performance of each individual new seedling variety over several years before final decisions are made about which seedlings he wishes to keep. This process can take 10 years from the time of seed collection! 

You may be happy to choose based on the parentage and tasting notes below, but you are also welcome to contact us to try actual samples of these new apples which can be sent in the post.

Note that the process of acquiring and naming can take 12 - 24 months because of the bureaucracy involved.

How much does it cost?

The price for acquiring your own unique apple variety is £1,000 inc.VAT

You will receive:

• Three trees of your new variety.*

• A letter from us assigning the rights to the new variety to you.

• The DNA sequence of your new variety once it becomes available.

• Registration of the new variety on a UK apple DNA database.

• Registration of the new variety on www.OrangePippin.com, a popular website of apple varieties.

You are then able to go ahead and name the variety with whatever name you wish (subject to copyright and trademark laws).

*We can propagate more trees for you at our regular custom-graft price if you wish.

If you simply want to own and name your own apple variety the above arrangements should be sufficient to establish ownership. However to properly commercialise the new variety and licence it for production you would need to register and pay for plant breeders rights (PBR) or request a trademark.

Available seedling varieties from our apple breeding programme

We currently have the following new apple seedlings in our apple breeding programme. The list includes our tasting notes and expected parentage.

Seedling 23, a very sweet early red skinned variety. 

There are several videos on our YouTube channel explaining the breeding process.

To find out more please use the contact page on our website and our Nursery Manager will get in touch.