If you plant the pips/seeds of an apple it will in time produce a tree that bears small, sour apples like its wild forebears, and therefore a waste of your time and garden space. It therefore makes perfect sense to buy a ready-made tree, one that can possibly bare fruit in the same year that you plant it. Choose a variety of apple that you like and with the type of rootstock suitable for your needs. The rootstock is crucial to the trees ability to flourish in the environment where it is to grow, and will ensure that it will only attain a height that your garden can afford.



When choosing fruit trees such as apples you must take into consideration the pollination period crucial to fruit production. Trees unless they are self-fertile must have a companion from the same pollination group. For example - 'Cox's Orange Pippin', 'Elstar', 'James Grieve' and 'Bramley' will pollinate each other. Apple varieties fall into three groups - early, mid-season and late flowering. The following combinations also give ample pollination - E (early) and M (mid), or M (mid) and L (late). However, a combination of E (early) and L (late) are unlikely to produce fruit, as the flowering periods are too far apart for our friends the bees to transfer pollen from one tree to another.

Fruit Rootstocks:

Apples: - As apples do not do well on their own roots, it is necessary to bud or graft them onto the roots of wild apples. Grafting involves splicing the branch of one apple tree onto another, or onto "root stock." The spliced branch is held on with tape or coated with wax until it starts to grow. Most of the apple trees planted before the 1950s are on standard rootstock, which means they grew to be very large. Now there are essentially three broad categories of rootstocks that will determine the height of your trees: dwarf, semi dwarf, and standard. There are numerous types of dwarf and semi dwarf rootstocks, before you purchase your tree, you should review the characteristics before making a final decision.

Trees on semi dwarf rootstock will reach a height that is only about 60 to 75 percent the height of a standard size tree. Apple trees on dwarf rootstock have the advantages that they bear fruit earlier, can be planted closer together and are easier to spray and harvest. For example, a 'Bramley' grafted on to an M27 rootstock would grown into a bush, never more than about 8-ft (2.4m) tall, while a 'Bramley' grafted on to an MM111 rootstock would grow into a full tree, about 18-20 ft (5.4m-6m) tall. Both would bear the well-known Bramley apples. The choice of M27, M9, M26, M25, MM106 and MM111 rootstocks allow a variety of trees to suit all growing situations and preferences. Using dwarfing rootstocks like M27, allows the planting of several trees in a smaller area rather than one tree on a vigorous rootstock.

Therefore, the shape of tree ultimately required, such as cordon, bush, standard or espalier is determined by the choice of the rootstock.