Help with growing grants
We help you find and apply for fruit-tree and land grants, so the cost of planting does not fall on you alone.
A UK-wide network of heritage orchards
UK Fruit is a charity uniting growers, landowners and old orchards across Britain to bring rare heritage fruit back into cultivation. It began with ten thousand trees on a Roman fort at Coombe Bissett in Wiltshire. It grows with every orchard that joins.
Act one · The question
Within a single century, most of them vanished. Growers narrowed to the handful of varieties that ship well, store well and look the same in January as in July. The rest, local cultivars raised over centuries for flavour, storage and use, slipped out of the ground and out of memory.
named apple varieties once grown in Britain, alongside traditional pears and other English fruit.
of England's traditional orchards lost since the 1900s, and the varieties they held with them.
of varieties now fills the supermarket shelf, with questionable and depreciating nutritional value. We exist to widen that shelf again.
Act two · The home site
Our home orchard stands on an ancient Roman fort in the chalk downland of the Chalke Valley at Coombe Bissett, south of Salisbury in Wiltshire. The fort has watched over the valley for the best part of two thousand years. The trees planted across it are barely a decade old.
Old ground teaches patience. Watching heritage varieties establish on soil this ancient is the clearest expression of what we are trying to do: growth measured not in seasons, but in generations.
The Roman era
A Roman fort commands the valley. The earthworks it leaves behind still shape the ground our trees grow in today.
For centuries
The River Ebble threads through Coombe Bissett, and the downland above it has been worked for generations. Ground like this holds its history close to the surface.
The 1900s onward
Across England, around ninety per cent of traditional orchards are lost. Centuries of local breeding go quietly with them.
The 2020s
UK Fruit plants its first ten thousand young heritage fruit trees across the fort: planted, guarded and recorded, from bare-root whip onward. Wild beavers return to the river below, reshaping the water the orchard drinks from.
What comes next
Everything the home site teaches us is shared with growers across the country. The next chapter is the network.
The ambition
heritage fruit trees. No single site can hold that many, and no single site should. That is the point of everything that follows.
Act three · The idea
Selected for flavour, nutrition, resilience and history, the varieties worth saving each need many homes, not one. So we are building a UK-wide network of partner orchards: landowners with a field to spare, existing orchards outside commercial production, smallholders, and people planting their first tree. Each site keeps its own character and its own ground.
What joins them is the structure behind it. Partner sites are unified under a single land registry unit, so scattered orchards can act with the combined growing power of one estate: one shared knowledge base, one variety record, one harvest put to charitable use.
For growers and landowners
Joining the network is practical, not ceremonial. Here is what we bring to the growers who work with us.
We help you find and apply for fruit-tree and land grants, so the cost of planting does not fall on you alone.
Variety records, rootstock advice and contacts, pooled across every orchard in the network and open to every member.
Practical support from planting to harvest, whether it is your first tree or your five hundredth.
We can process and distribute your harvest for charitable purposes on your behalf, so nothing goes to waste.
Variety names, rough acreage and where you are matter more than scale. Even a few unidentified old cookers on a couple of acres are worth telling us about.
We match heritage varieties to your ground, help secure grant funding, and support the planting from bare-root whip onward.
Your orchard joins the shared record and the shared harvest: one more home for fruit that nearly disappeared.
Act four · Education
What happened to Britain's apples? That is where we begin with every group we teach. From it come the real subjects: how local cultivars were bred and lost, how you graft and identify a tree, what an orchard does for a valley, and why a diverse diet of fruit is worth protecting.
We don't lecture. Sessions are shaped around what a group already knows and wants to find out, and they tend to end with more questions than they started with.
"A morning in the orchard: hands on the trees, mud on your boots, and a real question to chew on."
Grafting mornings, orchard visits and classroom sessions on the history and health of heritage fruit, built around the group in front of us rather than a fixed script.
We work with research bodies on variety diversity, dietary breadth and the resilience of traditional fruit growing.
Talks, tastings and seasonal open days at our home orchard for anyone curious about heritage fruit and the valley it grows in.
Heritage apples range from sharp cookers to dense, nutty dessert varieties: differences the supermarket shelf flattens out.
The plant compounds behind an apple's colour and tartness, and much of its nutritional interest, vary widely between old cultivars.
Eating a range of varieties across the season, rather than the same few year-round, is a simple, underused idea worth teaching, especially to children building lifelong eating habits.
Act five · Get involved
We are a registered charity, and the support we need most is not a donation. It is land, knowledge, time and partnership. Tell us what you can offer and we will find where it takes root.
Orcharding, grafting, ecology, surveying, law, logistics, teaching: an hour of expert advice can move the whole network forward.
Offer your expertiseA field to spare, an old orchard outside production, or a single tree that might turn out to be rarer than anyone realised.
Tell us about your landBusinesses can talk to us about registering a carbon offsetting scheme: long-lived heritage fruit trees that lock up carbon while feeding people and nature.
Ask about offsettingPlanting days, recording varieties, helping a school visit run smoothly: practical hands are always welcome at our home orchard and across the network.
Volunteer with usGrant bodies and funders: we report against specific outputs, trees planted, variety counts and school reach, measured and shared in full. If you fund heritage, nature recovery or education, we would welcome a conversation.
Contact
Whether you grow, teach, fund, run a business, or simply have an old tree you are curious about, we would be glad to hear from you. The more specific you can be about your varieties, acreage and location, the better.
Prefer email? Write to us directly at m@ukfruit.com. We aim to reply to every enquiry within a week.