Flowering and picking at the National Fruit Collection

When do cider apples flower and ripen at the UK national collection?

The collection records, for each accession, the day it reached 10% flowering, full (80%) flowering and 90% petal fall, and a picking time in thirds of a month. Among the cider apples transcribed here, full bloom runs from 20 April for Muscadet de Dieppe to 24 May for Brown Snout and Vilberie, and picking from mid September to mid November.

The spread is the useful part. Cultivars that share a flowering group in nursery practice can sit a fortnight apart at Brogdale, and Tardive Forestier, recorded on the site as a late-flowering apple, is among the first to bloom there. Neither the groups nor the dates are wrong; they are different kinds of statement, and the page for each cultivar shows both.

The programme

Transcribed from the source as published. Nothing in this panel is CiderHQ’s wording.

Site: Brogdale Farm, near Faversham, Kent, England
Period: Not stated by the collection
Cultivars transcribed: 44
Measurements: 0
Values withheld: None
Classifies under: No classification scheme

Climate. South-east England, away from the West Country and Three Counties orchards where most of these cultivars were raised. Flowering and harvest move with site and season.

Method. The collection’s own characterisation: the dates of 10% flowering, full (80%) flowering and 90% petal fall, and a picking time given as early, mid or late in a month. The years of observation are not published.

What the source says about itself

One collection site and an unstated run of seasons. The dates place cultivars relative to one another at Brogdale; they are not a calendar for any other orchard.

What it adds

Dated flowering for eighteen cider apples that carry no flowering group on the site, and a second, independent reading for twenty-six that do.
Three stages rather than one, so the length of a cultivar’s blossom is visible as well as its timing — which is what decides whether two trees actually overlap.
Picking times from one collection, beside the harvest windows written into each cultivar record.

What it cannot be asked

Stated as limits rather than as apology. A dataset with known bounds is more useful than one presented as complete.

The collection does not say in which year or years the dates were taken, or whether they are single seasons or means. They are transcribed as published and not treated as averages.
One site in Kent. Blossom and harvest move with site, season and rootstock, and a date at Brogdale is not a date for a Herefordshire or Somerset orchard.
Accessions are collection labels. Only accessions carrying the cultivar’s own name are used; Improved Dove, Red Foxwhelp, Somerset Redstreak and Pig’s Snout are held as distinct accessions and are not attached to the nearest-named cultivar, and Crimson King is left out because the collection types its accession as a dessert apple.
No perry pear in the collection’s perry-typed accessions carries a flowering or picking record, so this dataset adds nothing for perry.

Why these figures are not universal

One collection orchard and an unstated run of seasons. The dates rank cultivars against one another at Brogdale; a grower elsewhere should expect the same order more than the same days.

What it can be read beside

The commonest way to misuse this corpus is not to misread one figure but to put two side by side that were never measuring the same thing. This is the judgement, stated.

Whether Flowering and picking at the National Fruit Collection may be read in one column with the site’s other datasets
Dataset	Verdict	Why
The WSU Mount Vernon cider cultivar trial	Partly comparable	Both report bloom dates for some of the same cider apples. The sites, seasons and the stage recorded differ — Mount Vernon gives a mean full bloom, Brogdale three stages — so the order of cultivars can be compared and the dates cannot.

Where a dataset is not listed, no judgement has been recorded and the safe reading is that the two have not been checked against each other. CiderHQ never averages across studies: how evidence is handled sets out why.

Cultivars in this dataset

Each carries this programme’s figures on its own page, alongside whatever else has measured it.

Where the site uses these figures

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

National Fruit Collection
University of Reading / Defra, Brogdale · research institute · passage verified 2026-10-29
How this source was checked
The UK national reference collection for apple and pear cultivars. The authority CiderHQ uses for whether two names are the same fruit, which is the central duplicate-resolution problem in cider data.