Best Apple Tree Varieties to Grow in the UK

The British climate makes for ideal apple territory.
They like well drained, fertile soil including clay, and with shelter can grow inland at altitudes up to about 900 feet / 275 metres!

Apple trees are the largest range of fruit trees we have for sale.

Before you buy an apple tree, have a think about which varieties you want to choose.

Guide to Choosing Apple Varieties

Just tell me the best apples for the British home grower, please

The two best normal eating apples for the home grower are:
- Red Windsor for the more humid, warmer West of Britain
- Red Falstaff for the dryer, cooler East of the country
The best all-round, multipurpose apple, good for eating, cooking, juicing, and cider is James Grieve.
The best cooking apple is Bramley’s Seedling

Once you have those three in your collection, consider Norfolk Royal Russet, the best russet apple.

The best cider apples are “vintage quality“, meaning you only need one variety for a full-bodied brew.
There are four cider flavour categories. The best vintage apples in each are:
- Kingston Black (Bittersharp)
- Browns Apple (Sharp)
- Sweet Coppin (Sweet)
- Harry Masters (Bittersweet)

Difference between cooking, eating and cider apple varieties

The distinction between cooking, eating and cider apples is ultimately your preference for using them.

Cookers: usually large and too acidic-sharp to enjoy fresh, although some sweeten as they ripen into tangy eaters late in the year.
Eaters: tend to be medium size, with more sugar content, diverse in terms of bite, depth of flavour, and juiciness.
Cider apples: often the smallest, and inedible fresh. Good bitter or bitter-sharp cider demands high tannin levels, which is astringent and makes your palate pucker up.
They tend to be on the mushy side, ideal for pressing the juice out.

Choosing Apple Varieties

We stock over 110 apple tree varieties and everyone has their own preferences & situation, so here are general pointers:

If you only have room for one tree, look to the self-fertile multi-purpose (eaters, cookers and juicers) varieties, the king of which is James Grieve. Lane’s Prince Albert is also good.
Early ripening apples tend to have thin skins and do not store well, so are less common in supermarkets – all the more reason to grow them yourself. They are delicious off the tree. Discovery is a superb early eater, and Grenadier is one of the earliest cookers.
Some apples store and ripen better after picking than others. These are the ones that you do find in the supermarkets, where they should be plentiful and cheap in season, but it still makes sense to grow them yourself: a Golden Delicious off the tree is a totally different creature from the poor things you find on shop shelves; they’ve had ever such a rough time getting there.
Plenty of varieties which are known as cookers will ripen into eaters in time, especially the older ones that have longer cropping seasons than modern varieties, where fruit harvested after the main crop are sweeter. Howgate Wonder, which is a huge cooker, is utterly delicious eaten raw late in the season and by Christmas it has a seasonal cinnamon taste.
If you are growing espaliers and cordons, you can have a wide range of apples in a small space. If you choose your trees so that they cover the cropping calendar, from August to early winter, you will get a steady crop of apples each month, and avoid having too many to store, eat etc.

Planning Your Orchard

Location

This is the first consideration, which rules out those apple tree varieties not recommended for your location, and may dictate precisely how you train your tree. Three major examples:

The further North you are, the more value there is in training trees as cordons or espaliers against a sheltered, sunny South facing wall. Also, you want varieties that flower later (giving them a better chance of avoiding late spring frosts), and ripen earlier due to your shorter growing season: have a look at our list of hardy apple trees for Scotland.
In warm, humid areas of the South and West, it is wise to choose scab resistant varieties (Red Windsor is perfect).
In drier Eastern parts of the country, mildew resistance is more important (Red Falstaff is perfect).

Aspect

South-west facing is best, but it can be windy.
East facing is a problem if it is in full sun early in the morning, as frozen flowers will defrost too fast to survive, so late flowering varieties are best. By the same token, don’t plant frost prone, early flowering varieties in frost pockets!
North facing sites lack sufficient sun for sweet eating varieties to ripen well, so try sour cooking apples and crab apples (frankly, a Morello sour cherry is your best bet).

High altitude is a challenge

It’s challenging to grow fruit at high altitude, where the thin air, strong wind, shorter growing season, and lack of insects all work against you.

Choosing Sizes

In a home orchard setting, you want freestanding trees: shorter bushes (with a short trunk, under 75cm) or taller half standards (with a trunk about 135cm tall). Bushes are much easier to pick, half standards are easier to mow under and give bigger crops.

In smaller gardens, the ratio of vertical surfaces increases, so it makes more sense to train trees up against walls, fences or straining wires as cordons or espaliers, both of which can be made from maidens (as long as the variety is spur bearing), and a selection of our apples and pears are sold as ready-made cordons.

A wire trained tree obviously carries much less total fruit than a freestanding one, but because they take up less space and their ratio of fruiting to support wood is higher, they are actually more efficient in terms of fruit per volume of space used, which is one reason why most new commercial orchards use wire-trained methods.

Cordons can be planted as close as 60cm apart along a row, so you can pack several varieties into only a few metres.
Espaliers need at least 2-3 metres each, but they also carry larger crops than cordons.

In patios, balconies, decks and terraces without beds, apple trees can be grown in pots.
Large containers of 30 litres and upwards are enough for a bush on an M9 rootstock, but dwarf apple trees and columnar ballerina apples such as Flamenco and Samba (which we don’t sell) will be happy in smaller pots.
Use soil based compost for best results, and remember that large pots of moist compost are heavy, so be careful what you put them on!

Rootstocks

The rootstocks we use are noted on each tree’s description page, and you almost never need to choose between them: we have already chosen the best one for each form!
The rare exceptions are when you want an extra vigorous cordon or bush, in which case it’s better to start with a maiden on MM106 than with a ready-made cordon on M9 or bush on M26.

The majority of our apples use the semi-dwarfing rootstock MM106: vigorous enough for good-sized bushes and half-standards in an orchard, but still restrictive enough for espaliers and cordons with most varieties.
Many of our ready-made cordons are on M9 dwarfing rootstocks, which need permanent staking / support.
A small selection of vigorous trees, especially in their bush form, are on the less dwarfing M26, which is in between MM106 and M9.

Fruit Management

How much fruit do I get off an apple tree?

Apples take 8-10 years to reach mature size, and produce their best crops for about 60 years, producing around 10,000 – 15,000 apples in that time.
If you start with a half standard size tree, the biggest we sell, that is less than 0.25p for every fresh, organic apple grown in your garden, or about 4-5 apples per penny.

Apple Tree Pollination

Apples and compatible crab apples are very common in the UK, so apple tree pollination is rarely a concern, even in cities.

If you start by choosing your trees by their cropping period, given that most home growers want a mix of early and late ripening varieties, then check their pollination groups, in most cases they will link up.

A surefire way to pollinate an entire orchard is a Golden Hornet and a John Downie crab apple, which between them cover the whole apple flowering season, and have good fruit for cooking.

If you only have space for one full sized apple tree, you should be able to add another variety as a cordon to ensure a local partner.

Simple Apple Storage

Only store perfect looking apples that you picked from the tree. Any damaged or windfall fruit should be juiced, cooked, made into jam or just eaten right away.

Store apples in a cold but frost free place. A little humidity in the air is beneficial, but there should also be decent ventilation. Garages, most cellars, outhouses and shed are all ideal. Lofts tend to get too warm, but they can work in some houses.

If you have room, space the apples out so that they aren’t touching each other. If you need to pack them in closely, you will have to wrap each one in paper to reduce the chances of rot spreading from one bad apple to your whole crop.

Avoid stacking the apples if possible. If you have to do it, only stack one layer high and place a sheet of thin cardboard between the two layers to spread out the weight.
Tip: The moulded papier-mâché trays you see in green grocers and supermarkets are ideal for storing apples.

Storing apples starts with picking them the right way, which is carefully! Part of the secret of storing apples successfully is judging when to pick them; practice makes perfect.

A cropping apple tree usually needs to be picked over several times. Fruit on the sunny side of the apple tree will ripen before the ones on the shady side and apples on the outer branches will ripen before the ones on inner or lower branches. Pick apples with the best colour and only pick them when they are ripe.

A ripe apple comes off the tree when it is lifted and twisted about a quarter of a turn – do not pull apples off. The apple should detach with the stalk. Take care not to bruise the fruit and use a padded or soft cloth container to carry them down from the tree.

Which Varieties are Good for Storage?

As a general rule,

Early cropping apples ready in August & September do not store well
Later cropping apples mostly store well
A number of late-cropping varieties only taste their best after a few weeks of ripening off the branch

Some of the best apples for storage are: Ashmeads Kernel, Blenheim Orange, Bramley, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Howgate Wonder, Kidd’s Orange Red, Lanes Prince Albert, Pixie, Egremont Russet (in fact, pretty much all russet apples are good for storing) & Winter Gem.

Each variety ripens at its own rate, so store them separately and label them so you remember which is which.
Check them regularly for rot.