When I first started following Andy on Instagram back in 2020, he was just starting to share his gardening journey whilst still a principal dancer for the Scottish Ballet. He had a plant story - but it was not what I was expecting.
He remembered that as a small child he had played beneath an apple tree in his grandparents’ garden, hopping about pretending to be a rabbit. The apples, he said, were the size of small training footballs! The tree was a ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ and the family had always wondered whether, since it shared their family name, they may have some connection to it. I began to investigate.
Andy pointed me to a site called Orange Pippin where the apple was listed and amongst the comments thread was one from Anna in British Columbia which said that “the tree…was developed in Lincolnshire by her great grandmother”.
I started searching for ‘Anna in BC’. One evening I called everyone listed under the name of ‘Peasgood’ in the British Columbia phone directory - there aren’t that many. I had some lovely conversations but didn’t find Anna. Then, out of the blue, I received an email, “Good morning. I have been sent your email by the Orange Pippin site. You were enquiring about the ‘Peasgood’, Anna.”
Anna and I began to converse over email and it turned out that she had a number of original documents pertaining to the apple tree. Over the course of a conversation for the podcast between Andy, Anna, and I, we discovered that Anna’s great grandmother had, as a young girl, planted an apple pip in her home in Lincolnshire. When she married a Mr. Peasgood, she took the apple tree with her to their new home in Stamford.
The tree began to produce apples and they were, as Andy had said, very large. The fruit was taken to the Stamford Flower Show and presumably, due to its size, it stood out, and a decision was made to take it to the RHS. Anna still has the certificate sent to Mr. Peasgood by the RHS in 1872, wherein the RHS Fruit Committee grants the tree a First Class Certificate, naming it the ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’. Nonsuch means ‘none as good as’ and as Anna observed in the podcast, the apostrophe is important!
In the podcast we had a contribution from Richard Borrie, the founder of the Orange Pippin site. As he reminded us, “Every pip that you plant is actually a new variety. In that sense, apples are like humans. You have the mother and the father and then you have a new variety, the child is a new, unique, individual variety”.
These plant stories always seem to lead to more stories, and there are currently three episodes spanning from Andy's original story. Becoming mildly obsessed with this apple, I took myself off to the RHS Lindley library. There I discovered that a Mr. R. Gilbert of Burghley House was showing the ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ at the RHS National Apple Congress in 1883. I contacted the current Head Gardener of Burghley House, Joe Whitehead, who knew all about Mr. R. Gilbert and so I found myself making an offshoot episode - standing in a six-acre walled garden, once gardened by 120 gardeners with Mr. R. Gilbert leading the team. The walled garden was abandoned in the 1960s but Joe has a plan to bring it back to life - and this will include ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ apple trees.
Joe introduced me to Denis Smith whose passion for apples was sparked at a local apple day. So now there was an Apple Day bonus episode, where we discovered the parentage of the ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’.
It would seem that at this stage the story has finally ended but I was recently in contact with the Editor of New Zealand Garden Magazine who told me that she has a ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ in her garden. Maybe there is another chapter to come: of how some of these heritage apples found their way to New Zealand.
Sadly, we did not find a direct connection between Andy and Anna’s family trees but Andy still concluded that for now it was “a lovely story”. I am yet to taste my first ‘Peasgood’s Nonsuch’ apple but I am hopeful it will happen.
Perhaps someone reading this will, like Andy Peasgood, have a plant story that they would like to share. Sally is currently looking and researching stories for series two which will begin in January. In the meantime, there are plenty of stories from peonies to passion flowers and fig trees to willow trees to catch up on from series one of 'Our Plant Stories'.