05/19/2026
Want a story of survival and perseverance? I nominate the tale of the Discovery apple.
After the end of World War II, an orchard worker from Blacksmith’s Corner, somewhere in Essex in England, George Dummer, grew a few seedling trees to transfer to his home garden. Dummer, who had only had one arm, was working with his wife to get the bareroot trees into the ground, when she had an accident and sprained her ankle. The job of planting trees was abandoned. Covered only by a cloth sack, the forgotten young trees were left unplanted for several months and exposed to frosts. When they were discovered and finally planted, only one survived. They had had little hope that any would. By 1949, however, it not only lived, but it produced a large crop of delightfully tasting, early apples. A few years later, a nursery owner from Thurston in Suffolk, Jack Mathews, heard about the apple. He was probably more interested in the fruit’s flavor than the tree’s determination and perseverance, but he also knew about marketing. He acquired some scionwood to add to his own orchard. He was so impressed with the variety once the trees matured that he went on to buy the rights to the tree. In 1962, he held an apple release party to introduce the apple variety publicly and much more widely than the Dummer family would have dreamed of. Early names for the variety, “Dummer's Pippin” and “Thurston August,” had been dropped, and it was released commercially as “Discovery.” Quite the entrepreneur, Mathews sent Discovery apples to the Queen Mother apples on her birthday in August, and soon after this gala release, the Discovery became the most popular early-season apple in England.
Less beloved, but still appreciated, it has spread to other parts of the world. We first encountered Discovery apples at Little Tree Orchard in Newfield, NY. We liked it, even though at the time we didn’t know its story. We grafted scionwood successfully, and had our own little tree, but in 2023 the tree broke in a windstorm. We never tasted apples from that tree. I salvaged Discovery scionwood and regrafted it to different rootstock. In 2024 it was reborn. This year, there are not yet blossoms. When I first wrote this story, I remembered incorrectly that there were. The apple trees around the Discovery do have blossoms, so they appear to have survived the killer frost we had three weeks ago. We are very hopeful that we will be tasting the fruits from those trees starting in August and through to sometime in 2017. Maybe next year the little Discovery will be full of blossoms and then full of apples. I know it will be trying.
Perseverance! Survival! Discovery!
