An apple found by chance in woodland turned out to be an "interesting" new variety.
Nature lover Archie Thomas stumbled across a solitary apple on a wooded trackway near his home in Wiltshire in early November.
The apple, which Mr Thomas said was “unlike any I’d seen before”, had come from a lone old apple tree in the hedgerow with a large number of fruit on it.
A "wild apple chase" led him to an expert who identified it as a new variety which he could propagate and name.
Mr Thomas, who works for wild plant and fungi conservation charity Plantlife, was keen to identify the unusual apple from the little-visited spot in the Nadder Valley, Wiltshire.
He said: “While I am certainly no fruit expert it immediately struck me as highly unusual, unlike any apple I’d seen before.
“Excited by the pale and mottled oddity, I set about trying to get it identified with a view to perhaps one day being able to name it.
“That was the dream, but I did half suspect it would turn out to be something much less exciting than it is.”
After what he describes as a “wild apple chase”, with many fruit experts flummoxed by the find, he received help from Plantlife colleagues.
He was then pointed towards the Royal Horticultural Society fruit identification service at RHS Wisley.
RHS fruit specialist Jim Arbury inspected three of the apples and informed Mr Thomas it was a new variety which he could propagate and name.
Mr Arbury said it was “a very interesting apple”.
He said: "It is clearly not a planted tree, but a seedling that could be a cross between a cultivated apple and a wild Malus sylvestris, a European crab apple.
“It tastes quite good. It’s a cooking apple or dual purpose, you can eat it, it’s got a bit of acidity but it’s got some flavour, and some tannin, which is what you have in cider apples." Wales Online.
