Have you seen this gooseberry?

I love a good urban myth. A good rural myth is even better.

There is a gooseberry known as the Flintshire gooseberry. It is, rumour has it, a prolific cropper: it was born and bred in north-east Wales, around the Wrexham area, and if you ask anyone around there who knows fruit, they'll mention it with pride as their local gooseberry.

The trouble is, it may not even exist.

One man has been looking for this gooseberry, quite hard, since 2003, and still hasn't found it. He's Simon Farr, who runs the North East Wales Orchards Initiative, currently surveying and reviving ancient orchards in north-east Wales and neighbouring counties in England. Now even he admits he's beginning to wonder if it's a myth.

'We've gone through the old catalogues and looked in all sorts of places to find it,' he told me,' and there's not even a description.'

His orchards survey already has one high-profile success story when it comes to finding obscure fruit: the Denbigh Plum, first mentioned in 1785 and believed to be the only surviving native Welsh plum, was almost extinct a few years ago. Then its plight was highlighted by the project, and caught the attention of a chap called Ian Sturrock.

Ian has a good pedigree on saving rare fruit: he's responsible for rescuing the Bardsey Apple, the last tree of which was found growing on an island off the north coast of Wales. Much grafting later and you can even buy one to grow in your garden; and so it is with the Denbigh Plum. In fact so complete is this fruit's return from obscurity that it now has its own festival.

Not so the Flintshire gooseberry, though. Simon says almost everyone in the area can tell you about it: if it is a myth, it's certainly a persistent one. Some even remember having a Flintshire gooseberry in their gardens, or their parents' gardens. What's worse, all they can tell you is that it was a prolific cropper: no word about what it looked like, or even if it was a green or a purple variety.

Simon thinks it might just be a chance seedling from a wild gooseberry, found commonly in the hedgerows here: they're also reported growing further afield, too, in the Lake District and Northumberland.

Wild gooseberries are small, the size of marbles (the Plants for a Future database has them at 1cm diameter), and also rather hairy and can be sharp to the taste (though if you can find the plum red ones, they're much sweeter – if you beat the wasps to it).

There's a fair bit of debate over whether these hedgerow gooseberries are truly wild, or just garden escapees. There's no particular reason why Ribes uva-crispa shouldn't be a wilding: it grows perfectly well in most temperate woodland settings, and there's a long and honourable tradition of wild gooseberries in America, though they're different species: there's Ribes oxyacanthoides, the bristly wild gooseberry; R. cynosbati, the prickly gooseberry; and with no small relief R. hirtellum, which is merely a bit hairy.

And there is a wealth of common names for gooseberries – 26 of them, grossetts, feaberries, goosegogs... – which hints at a long history. They've been eaten since the 13^th century and grown in gardens since the 16^th century, although it was (isn't it always) the Victorians who really shook things up in the gooseberry world by breeding many of the best-loved varieties we grow today.

But those who argue that the hedgerow plants are from the garden point out that they weren't recorded in the wild till 1763 – long after it was grown in cultivation. And there's an argument that they aren't British native plants after all: the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) certainly takes this view, pointing out that the spread of the wild gooseberry has happened since they became popular in gardens. But you can always argue the toss on native status, especially in this case.

Anyway, back to the Flintshire gooseberry: poor Simon is still on the hunt for it, and regularly follows up leads such as the old market gardens in Rhyll said to have a healthy population of Flintshire gooseberries which turned out to be a fine but nonetheless inescapably English collection of old varieties.

So have you seen this gooseberry? If you think you might have it growing in your garden – the North East Wales Orchard Initiative would like to hear from you.

Inspiration from West Dean #3

If you thought training fruit was a simple matter of arranging the branches in a sort of fan-shape against a wall, think again.

You can trim them into single stems - cordons - trimming off all the side shoots to encourage fruiting spurs from the main stem only. If you've heard of espaliers and fan-training, you've probably heard of cordons. The advantage to this is you get to pack about five varieties into a ten-foot space. You can grow cordons upright (though you get less fruit I believe) - like this:

And it doesn't have to be apples: this is a redcurrant ('Redstart') trained as a double-cordon.

And if you want to know what a double cordon is - here you go. You just allow that single stem to branch, once: doesn't take up much more space and doubles your yield.

You can train them along a fence into a hedge...


...or over an arch to make a tunnel.

Or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can build a sort of free-standing cage and train your fruit up that. Here's one they made earlier...

... and here's another one with a pointy top.

I'm a bit sceptical about cage training - can't see how you'd keep the air circulating around the centre of the fruit tree, and if you can't do that it's a recipe for fungal disease - but I'm willing to be convinced, and it sure does look pretty.

Thank you once again to Jim Buckland, Sarah Wain and the team at West Dean Gardens, near Chichester, for playing around experimenting and showing us all we don't necessarily have to do it like that.

Bigamous blogging

OK I admit it - I've been two-timing my blog.

Those nice people at online retailer Crocus are branching out from their Chelsea medal winning range of herbaceous perennials and such like, and have started selling fruit and veg plants (and seeds). They kindly but perhaps a little foolhardily asked me about my allotment. So I told them. At length. Again and again.

So all my witterings have now become their kitchen garden blog. Actually I've been secretly wanting to do this for ages - I'm a compulsive grower of fruit and veg and have been for years, but only occasionally allow them onto these pages. They will still turn up here from time to time, but now I can also go on about them at great length and in more detail than you could ever have thought possible.

You, too, can live through the harvest of every pea pod by my side: all you have to do is click here....

A lovely pair of melons!

Now boys, that's enough sniggering. I mean the horticultural kind, of course :D

I'm a melon virgin (oh stop it) - so I didn't really expect any results at all. So I was skipping all the way home when I found these in my allotment greenhouse:





One's a lot bigger than the other, and they're both on the small side at the moment, but hopefully they'll both reach a good enough size eventually (oh dear... what is it with double entendre and veg growing?). In the meantime, I've given them a bit of extra support (oh pleeeeease...) with a pair of old tights:



Being a bit of a babe, I only had black tights in the drawer so now I'm worrying they won't allow enough sunlight to get through for ripening. But we'll see.

Now, that's quite enough of that - I'm off to find something more sensible to talk about.