Medlars: Growing & Cooking: 31 (The English Kitchen) - Softcover

Steward, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1909248770 ISBN 13: 9781909248779

Publisher: Prospect Books, 2023

Synopsis

At Eastgate in rural North Norfolk, Jane Steward is reviving the medlar, an old English fruit which was once Britain’s sweet treat. Her trees are alive with colour for much of the year: white and yellow flowers in the summer, green leaves that turn to gold and russet. Grafted onto quince A rootstock, and helped by local honey bees, these are trees with prolific fruit.

Alongside the Nottingham variety of medlars, Jane has established a national culinary collection on her six-acre smallholding. Varieties include Breda , Dutch, Westerveld, Macrocarpa, Royal, Bredase Reus, Flanders Giant, Iranian medlars. Her book on medlars will have over 30 recipes alongside a myriad of information on this forgotten fruit.

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The Story of the Medlar

 

If the medlar had a golden age in England, it was probably between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Early enthusiasts of growing and eating medlars may well have taken their lead from royalty. While don’t know, for example, how often Henry VIII ate them, but he certainly received at least two batches of medlars between 1529 and 1532. In an account of the expenses paid from the privy purse during that period, we find the following for November 1531:

Itm

the xviij daye paied to the gardyner at hampton co’te for bringing peres and medelers to the Kings grace.

vij s. vj d.”

 

In October the following year, Henry took Anne Boleyn to France, where he met the French king, Francis I. Henry was hoping, among other things, to persuade Francis to use his influence with the Pope to help him secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In 1898, P.A. Hamy published a book about their interviews. He quoted ordinances and lists of provisions for Calais, where the English entertained the French. Among the sumptuous supplies of swans, geese, capons, ducks and larks were large quantities of medlars. One list, for the two kings and their trains for four meals, included four hundred dozen pears and the same number of medlars (middlers). In another list, medlars appeared alongside their close cousins, apples and pears.  

In her book A history of gardening in England, the botanist Alicia Amherst, 1865-1941, wrote that John Chapman, Henry VIII’s head gardener at Hampton Court Palace, laid out a new orchard for him. This was to the north of the old gardens, with fruit trees such as medlar, pear, damson, cherry and apple. Henry had acquired the property, and inherited Chapman, from Cardinal Wolsey in 1528, the Cardinal having fallen from royal favour after his failure to secure the desired annulment of Henry’s marriage. 

Referring to fruit generally, Joan Morgan and Alison Richards explain that royal example ‘helped to stimulate consumption in fashionable circles, which in turn led to the establishment of new orchards to supply the metropolis’, especially in Kent. In this way, Henry’s taste for medlars may have helped to popularise them in the upper echelons of society.  Also writing on this subject in the twentieth century, Miles Hadfield, a botanical artist and garden historian, was the first president of the Garden History Society. In 1976, he listed Mespilus germanica as one of the trees which were ‘widely planted in the great period of British landscape gardening and earlier’. It had been introduced, he noted, before 1548. As such, it was ‘a very early introduction’. 

The Elizabethan trend for planting orchards and kitchen gardens continued in the early years of the seventeenth century. John Tradescant (father) started as head gardener to Sir Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. He had already obtained for his garden medlar, quince, walnut and cherry trees from a grower named Henrich Marchfeld. A couple of years later he sent Tradescant to the Low Countries to buy more stock. The gardener kept accounts of his purchases and expenses, from which we can see what plants he bought and where. They are described in Mea Allan’s 1964 book about the Tradescants. 

            Tradescant crossed by ship from Gravesend to Flushing at the beginning of October. From there, he travelled to Leiden, via Middleburg, Rotterdam and Delft. After purchasing, among other things, roots of flowers and roses, he moved on to Haarlem, to buy trees. At Delft, he acquired a variety of fruit trees from the nurseryman Dirryk Hevesson. He purchased ‘two great medlar trees’ for 4s 0d and ‘two great medlar trees of naples’ for 5s 0d. Referring generally to the prices which he paid for plants, Mea Allan considers it certain that he didn’t buy anything that could be obtained in England: ‘These entries of costly fruits and plants are therefore valuable records of first introductions to this country’.

            Ms Allan suggests that this was the earliest record of the great medlar tree of Naples and that it was ‘evidently our large Dutch medlar’. If, however, it was the medlar of Naples which had been described in John Gerard’s herbal of 1597 and was later to appear in John Parkinson’s books of 1629 and 1640, it’s likely to have been the azerole. The other ‘great medlar trees’ may have been what we now call the Dutch variety, but there is no more detailed description in Tradescant’s account.  

Later that century, The Garden Notebook by Sir John Reresby catalogues the plants grown on the Thrybergh estate in Yorkshire and ‘adds to scarce knowledge on other contemporary gardens of the time’. Among the fruit trees growing between 1633 and 1644 were eight medlars of three sorts, though the names of the varieties are not recorded. 

The appeal of the medlar extended beyond the large estates of the later period. In his diary entry for January sixth 1785, the Reverend James Woodforde, the ‘Country Parson’ of Weston Longville in Norfolk, related that Mr Dade of nearby Mattishall had brought him some medlars from Mr Smith, the vicar of that parish.       

These are interesting glimpses into the heyday of the medlar, but when exactly had it been introduced to England and what evidence is there? 

We find ourselves on the relatively firm ground of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which offer us the first clear and reliable documentary records of medlars growing in England. For example, at Westminster Abbey, which had several gardens, some within the walled precinct and others outside. Each of these was run by a monk with the role of obedientiary, a minor official. The monk gardener was responsible for supplying produce required by the Abbey. In around 1266, Richard de Ware, Abbot of Westminster, directed the compilation of the Customary, a codification of the Abbey’s customs and practices. Among other things, it listed fruit and vegetables to be provided by the monk gardener. For the Vigil of St Laurence, a highly venerated martyr, every ninth August, medlars (mespila) were specified, along with cherries in season, plums, pears and nuts.                       

In the royal household’s account book for the fourteenth year (20 November 1285 to 19 November 1286) of Edward I’s reign, a bill from Nicholas the Fruiterer refers to medlars among only a few types of fruit, the others being pears, apples, quinces and nuts. The charge for all of these from Whitsuntide to November was 21l 14s 1½d.       

Other records, in this case from my old parish of Stepney in Tower Hamlets, just to the east of the City of London, relate that a Dominican friar, Henry Daniel, kept a garden where he grew 252 varieties of plant. John Harvey listed those plants described in his herbals as common, or sown and planted in gardens. These included the medlar. Harvey records that the medlar was listed in the Synonyma de nominibus herbarum by the fourteenth century physician and botanist John Bray. 

He also notes that its ‘beauty as a highly ornamental tree’ accounts for the fact that in 1326 a medlar was reserved for the bishop in a partition of the palace orchard at Wells in Somerset. The relevant entry in the register book of Wells Cathedral recorded a grant of a piece of the garden to Canon Michael de Eston and noted that ‘a tree commonly called a medler growing in the said piece’ near St Andrew’s Well would remain in the bishop’s hands.  The habit of planting medlar trees in ecclesiastical settings continues to this day, and there’s at least one relatively youthful and productive medlar tree growing within the cathedral grounds.        

To quote Harvey: ‘The work of the fourteenth century herbalists, and especially the writings of Henry Daniel, bring us into the era of scientific certainties rather than guesswork.’ A picture emerges of the plants cultivated in England. Among those available to ‘the typical medieval “herberur” working for a royal or noble patron”’ was the medlar tree, in leaf and flower in midsummer, with its ‘sculptured strength’.  

These records confirm that medlars had been established in England for about three hundred years by the time Henry VIII and Francis I feasted together in Calais. But how had medlars made their way to England in the first place? 

Massalia, Marseille, having been a Greek colony for six hundred years, fell to the Romans in the first century CE, and it was probably they, the Romans, who spread the medlar further into France. The strengthening of their position may have enabled them to introduce the medlar further north in France and east into southwestern Germany. Others think the Romans had found the medlar in the south of France where the Greeks had introduced it. This might be consistent with the idea that medlars spread from Greece via the Roman Empire through Northern Europe, but there is more speculation than evidence that this is the case. It seems possible that it gradually made its way northwest, and one way or another, we can only hypothesise how, the fruit did find its way to England at some stage during the Roman occupation. This may be the case for the fruit, but there’s no evidence that medlar trees were grown widely, or at all, in England at this time. 

Fortunately, and it is fortunate for us, archaeological excavations undertaken in the early years of the twentieth century at Silchester in Hampshire shed important light on the question of how medlars came to be in England. This undertaking of this work in 1903/4, which is the only evidence we have of a Roman connection to the medlar in England, coincides with the medlar’s gradual and imperceptible slide from view as the twentieth century unfolded. By the time Dr Lisa Lodwick completes her own follow up research on these early finds in 2002, the medlar is well and truly obscure in Britain, unknown and unrecognised by the vast majority. 

The archaeological site in question was an Iron Age settlement at Silchester which had been developed by the Roman occupiers. The excavation revealed the principal baths of the Roman era town in a place known as Insula XXIII which was near a brook and the town wall. A quantity of plant remains was revealed when the waterlogged contents of nearby wells and pits were passed through wire sieves. In among these remains were what the archaeologists described as ‘stones of the medlar’. There were two stones. 

This discovery was reported on by W.H. St John Hope and George E. Fox soon after. In their paper, they referred to the stones as coming from Pyrus germanica, a synonym for Mespilus germanica. The stones were examined by Clement Reid FRS, a palaeobotanist, and he noted that the medlar, ‘though cultivated by the Romans, was not previously known to have been introduced by them into England’. He described these two stones as hard and only about half the length of the cultivated fruit in his own collection. Reid had heard of a small medlar, only as large as a cherry, which was cultivated in Germany, and would have had stones about the same size as those found at Silchester. This suggests, plausibly, that the Silchester medlars were a smaller variety than many modern cultivars..

This body of work was reassessed by the archaeobotanist, Dr Lisa Lodwick of the University of Reading twenty years ago. She re-examined the archived plant remains and noted that these two stones of Mespilus germanica remained the only recorded finds of medlars from Roman England. And although there is no evidence of local cultivation, it can’t be ruled out absolutely. It’s possible that the fruit might have been an exotic import for personal or community consumption, but there was, and is, nothing to suggest that medlar trees were grown by the Romans in England.

This is all consistent with the theory that it was the Romans who took medlars north through Europe and onwards into England. However, the next part of the story remains lost to history. We don’t know what happened to medlars in England during the centuries after the Romans left.  There are no records until the thirteenth century. There may have been medlar trees in cultivation during the century following the Norman Conquest, in one form or another, in order that fruit was being picked in 1266. We know that medlar trees can be long-lived in a good growing situation, and that seed grown specimens take a long time to mature into fruit bearing trees. All very mysterious.

The Dark Ages, from the fifth to tenth centuries, was an exclusively English era; records of medlars growing in France and Germany in the eighth and ninth centuries have been found and are discussed later in this chapter. It’s entirely possible that medlar fruit and trees may have made their way across the English Channel during this time, but we can’t assume it. The historian John Harvey, in his book Medieval Gardens, writes that even if medlars had been introduced here in Roman times, they were a rarity during their occupation. Either because they were brought in occasionally with new arrivals from across the Channel, or were they seen as a luxury food, effectively restricted to the higher echelons of Romano British society. They may have faded from view towards the end of the Roman period and then died out completely in the Dark Ages, and been reintroduced later, along with the almond and the walnut. We just don’t know for sure. 

            Another possible red herring is the often claimed, earliest known written reference to the medlar in English by an Anglo-Saxon abbot, Ælfric, in the tenth century. Why coin a phrase for something that was unavailable? Ælfric is said to have called it an openaers (open-arse), a name which was still being used in literature several hundred years later. But the attribution to Ælfric isn’t as clear as it might appear at first. In Julius Zupitza’s 1880 edition of his Grammar and Glossary, which includes a list of trees, the word is nowhere to be found. It does appear in a word list described as Ælfrici Glossarium, at the end of William Somner’s 1659 dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon language, which was printed in Oxford for a London bookseller. The entry reads: ‘Mespila, open aers’. 

The difficulty is that Somner didn’t base this on any of the manuscripts which accompanied Ælfric’s Grammar. Instead, he chose to use a transcript given to him by a friend, Francis Junius. It was drawn from two glossaries, probably dating from the eleventh century. They may have taken the word from writings by Ælfric. Unfortunately, although Somner’s list has become known as Archbishop Ælfric’s Vocabulary, its author is unknown, and, in the words of C.A. Ladd, it has been ‘a source of never-ending confusion’ which neither confirms nor denies the existence and consumption of the fruit in England at this time.

Looking even further back in time, where was it exactly that medlar trees first grew in the wild? This is also uncertain. 

Medlars are native in Iran, the Caucasus, Crimea, the south-east Balkans, Greece, southern Bulgaria, northern Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenia (modern day Turkmenistan). Some scientists have suggested that these centres might be better described as places of the greatest diversity of a crop, rather than the medlar’s original home, but they are a useful starting point for our thinking. 

In the 1930s, botanist and geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1942) described eight ‘centres of origin’ of cultivated plants, those independent regions where in his view various indigenous plants were first grown. Vavilov placed Mespilus germanica in the interior of Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, Iran and Turkmenistan. Eminent Polish botanist, Kasimierz Browicz (1925-2009), believed that the ‘true homeland’ of the medlar was the south-east of the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Crimea, northern Iran and possibly Turkmenistan. His careful analysis of literary writings and evidence in herbariums have been in doubt since the discovery in the 1970s of leaf impressions at a site from the Last Interglacial period, between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, at Burgtonna, East Germany, far to the north-west of his suggested ‘homeland’ for the medlar. This doesn’t mean that the medlar wasn’t native to the countries listed, but only that his list may not be exhaustive. 

Browicz referred to a significant presence of wild medlars between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and it is on the western shores of the Caspian, the land-locked sea which is encircled by Turkmenistan, Iran, Armenia, Russia and Kazakhstan, that the medlar may have first been cultivated around three thousand years ago, according to the botanist Dr V.A. Evreinoff, writing in 1953. 

In 1950, P.M. Zukovskij wrote the following about Mespilus germanica: ‘Wild forms found in Turkmenia are probably escapes. The greatest form of diversity is found in Talysh in Azerbaijan, where it occurs at almost all altitudes… The plant was obviously domesticated in this area in ancient time’.

The medlar has a history spanning possibly three millennia, maybe grown by the Assyrians and Babylonians; the Greeks and Romans knew it. It would be a serious omission to consider the medlar’s ancient past without referring to The Medlar (Mespilus germanica, Rosaceae) from Antiquity to Obscurity, as John R. Baird and John W. Thieret title their article published in the journal Economic Botany in 1989. Theophrastus of Eresus (c371 to c287BCE), who is believed to have studied with Plato and with Aristotle as his mentor, was the author of two hugely important books on botany. In one, Historia Plantarum (Enquiry into Plants),translated by Sir Arthur Hort in 1916, there is an indication that he may have known the medlar and called itsataneios. He describes it as a fragrant fruit, with an astringent taste. In the first century CE, the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides served as a surgeon in the Roman army. In his encyclopaedia of medicine, best known by its Latin name, De materia medica, he wrote of trees called aronia and setanion, both of which produced astringent fruit which ripen slowly. His description of setanion isn’t definitive enough to support some views that this is the earliest written reference to a medlar. Unfortunately, as historian Karen Reeds has said, the word can’t be cross checked against other ancient sources: ‘his names are not necessarily the same as Theophrastus’’.

Pliny the Elder is remembered for his encyclopaedic account of the natural world, Naturalis Historia, which contains several references to a fruit called mespilis. The fruit had a little calyx at the top and the tree could be propagated from a seed or a slip. His description of the fruit adds little to that written by Theophrastus, but he does give us a clue to the date of its introduction. Pliny asserted that the tree, if it was Mespilus germanica, didn’t exist in Italy in Cato’s time, from about 234 to 149 BCE. Some say that the Greeks brought it from Macedonia around the time of these wars (214 to 148BCE) which would be hard to tie in with the timing of Naturalis Historia unless the reference was to the fruit and not the tree. Others take the view that the medlar didn’t arrive in Italy until the first century.

There’s also a suggestion that Pliny the Younger (c61 to c112CE), nephew of Pliny the Elder, wrote about the use of leaves, bark and roots of mespili to treat tumours. There is no mention of this in his correspondence, however a reference of this sort appears in a book called Medicina Plinii which is fourth century collection of medical recipes by an unknown author. This could be the source of the confusion.

By the second century medlars had reached parts of northern Europe. Archaeobotanical finds across a wide area of the continent confirm the presence of seed debris dating back to between the first and third centuries in the canton of Thurgau in Switzerland, the Main-Kinzig district of Germany, locations in the Massif Central in the Aveyron Department of southern France, Isere in south-eastern France, Brittany and urban environments in Annecy, Troyes, Reims and Lyon. 

Véronique Zech-Matterne of the French National Centre for Scientific Research has written of medlars in a rural area at Novy-Chevrières in the Ardennes, dating from the second or third century. She notes that before then, fruits were probably the privilege of the most affluent social classes, with the exception of wild berries, and they spread into poorer parts of the countryside only slowly, unless they were native species. Corrie Bakels’ (Leiden University) and Stefanie Jacomet’s (Basel University) studies have led them to conclude that such luxury foods (that is, those which are not necessary for survival) may have been imported from the beginning of Roman occupation, initially by the military, ‘especially those of higher rank and/or those originating from the Mediterranean region’, who wanted the kind of food they ate at home. Among the wider population, these fruits were probably adopted first in ‘the households of Roman civilians and some privileged indigenous inhabitants. The towns in which they lived were often the locations where the food destined for the army was handled and traded’.    

It’s from Carl Linnaeus’ Species plantarum (1753) that we get our modern name for the medlar, Mespilus germanica. When the Swedish botanist came to replace long and complicated names for plants with a consistent scheme of binomials, he called the medlar Mespilus germanica, possibly in the belief that it was native to Germany. He knew that medlars had grown in this part of Europe for many centuries. However, his binomial system significantly predates the twentieth century work done by Browicz, Vavilov, Evreinoff and Zukovski to locate the medlar’s original home. Now that we know about the ancient leaf impressions found at Burgtonna, it may be that the name is apt after all.        

Victorian botanist, Leopold Hartley Grindon, noted that varieties of Mespilus germanica with ‘enlarged and eatable fruit’ were common in gardens in the south of England, and the produce was ‘regularly brought to market’. It was certainly sold at the most famous of British fruit and vegetable markets, Covent Garden. In a sketch of Christmas in the Metropolis in the early 1850s, we read about a ‘tempting array of all that the depth of winter can produce’, such as ‘large English pineapples, pomegranates, brown biffins from Norfolk, and baskets of soft medlars’. Similarly, in Germany, it was said to rank ‘very high as a common fruit’, and large quantities were ‘disposed of on the market-stalls of all the principal cities’.

In the nineteenth century, there are occasional references to medlars growing in hedges or otherwise ‘wild’ as far apart as ‘Minishall’ (presumably, Minshull), Cheshire, Ashburnham in Sussex and – in small numbers - Redhill, Surrey. Dorothy Hartley quotes from A Child’s Guide of 1850: ‘They are kept in moist bran for a fortnight before being rotten enough to eat’.              

The literary historian and wine connoisseur George Saintsbury gave the medlar a ringing endorsement in his Notes on a Cellar-Book, first published in 1920. Addressing the question: ‘What, if anything, should be taken and eaten with after-dinner wine?’ He remarked that ‘the ‘whets’ of our ancestors were rather stimulants to drinking (which nobody but an abstainer or a drunkard should require) than meliorants of appreciation.’ As an accompaniment, his preference was for the medlar:

 

… the one fruit which seems to me to go best with all wine, from hock to sherry and from claret to port, is the medlar – an admirable and distinguished thing in and by itself, and a worthy mate for the best of liquors.

 

Nevertheless, the popularity of medlar fruit in England gradually declined into distant memory from around the end of the nineteenth century and took another downward turn in the aftermath of the First World War. 

These days it’s unlikely that you will find them at any English markets, other than perhaps a farmers’ market and then only in the season, November/December. The decline in popularity and availability isn’t rooted in a single cause. It’s not because a wide variety of imported fruit became available here, or that sugar was cheaper and more widely available than it had been previously. These may well have been factors, but so were the changes in our working patterns, more women working outside the home and the eventual arrival of domestic refrigerators and freezers which hugely influenced the day-to-day business of running a home and provisioning for a household. People may also have found that medlars required too much thought, storage and preparation before they could be enjoyed.  

The medlar’s golden age had long passed by the time Baird and Thieret wrote their authoritative article about the medlar for the journal Economic Botany in 1989. They described the fruit as “neglected and forgotten”, attributing its lack of popularity to, among other things, the necessity for bletting and its uninviting appearance when bletted. 

The last decade or so has seen the beginning of a slight upward trend in interest in the medlar fruit and in growing the trees. The same is true for the quince, which definitely has a wider following than it has enjoyed for several decades. Quinces are more often to be found at the greengrocer, possibly a surplus harvest kindly given by a nearby gardener. We’re a long way from a tipping point for medlars. I’m encouraged by the warm, autumn enthusiasm for medlars expressed by the current generation of British food writers following in the august footsteps of the late Jane Grigson who wrote so beautifully about them in her Fruit Book. Nigel Slater, Diana Henry, Xanthe Clay and preserves maker Pam Corbin have all made their contribution to the revival of Mespilus germanica. Eco-chef, Tom Hunt, writing in the Guardian newspaper last year shared a recipe for medlar cheese, the gently dehydrated pulp of the fruit. It complements blue cheese and his recipe can be found online. This is something I used to make commercially, but as a one-woman fruit grower and business owner, I concluded that I would do better to focus on making medlar jelly. Judging by the number of jars sold each year, it seems to be more accessible to the individual consumer. It pairs with the widest range of cheeses, game, charcuterie and meat. It sells consistently well to a wide audience of independent fine food shops. It’s also much less stressful to make in volume. 

A vocal medlar enthusiast is Mark Diacono, award-winning author and gardener. His first and last thought when deciding what to grow for himself is to think about the fruit and vegetables he most likes to eat and which are also almost impossible, or expensive, to buy. His fruit choices usually start with the ‘trinity of unbuyables’, the medlar, the mulberry and the quince. His superb recipe for Medlar Sticky Toffee Pudding is referenced annually on social media, and is reproduced in the Medlars in the Kitchen chapter with his kind permission. 

  

MEDLARS IN EUROPE

By the eighth century, on the other side of the English Channel, medlars were gaining prominence in the gardens of grand estates and monasteries, presumably for both the ornamental beauty of the trees and the perceived nutritional value of the fruit. Charlemagne (c742/747 -814CE), King of the Franks, King of the Lombards and Emperor of the Romans, founded what we now call the Carolingian Empire in western and central Europe. Towards the end of the eighth century, a text called the Capitulare de villis set out instructions for, among other things, the management of his estates. It directed that their gardens should contain a wide variety of plants, including medlars, mespilarios in Latin. The list of fruit trees included pear, plum, sorb, peach, quince, mulberry, fig and cherry. Another document, the Brevium exempla, issued by Charlemagne or his son Louis the Pious, between about 800 and 817CE, describes five crown estates in northern France where several properties included medlar trees in their orchards of pear, apple, peach, hazel, walnut, mulberry and quince.

            As referenced earlier, although there are no records or suggestions that medlars or medlar trees may have found their way across the English Channel around then, medlar trees were growing and producing fruit over here by the thirteenth century. 

The Plan of St Gall takes its name from the abbey where it is kept. The Plan is thought to originate from between 816 and 830CE. In the twelfth century, a monk folded it up and used it to write about the life of St Martin. This may be how it came to be placed in the monastic library. It’s been described as ‘a sophisticated architectural blueprint for a Utopian monastic community’. Its significance began to be recognised again in the seventeenth century. Although the Benedictine monastery which it envisaged was never built, the Plan reveals much about medieval life. Drawn on calfskin parchment in a monastery scriptorium at Reichenau, an island in Lake Constance, it extends from the basilica to outbuildings and gardens. In 1979, Walter Horn and Ernest Born published a major study of the Plan. In volume two they described the cemetery, the grounds of which served also as an orchard. A verse couplet is inscribed on the Plan, at the location of a monumental cross. Horn and Born translated it as follows:

 

Among the trees of the soil, always the most sacred is the Cross

On which the fruits of eternal health are fragrant.

 

Fruit trees were to be planted in spaces between the burial plots. They included mispolarius (Mespilus germanica), alongside sorbarius (the service tree, Sorbus domestica). Horn and Born note that medieval monks contributed greatly to European horticulture by improving trees though selective breeding and grafting.

Moorish Spain was a centre of medlar cultivation by the twelfth century. John Harvey, writing in 1992, listed the plants grown in the south of the country in the Middle Ages by reference to five sources. The medlar (zu^crur) appeared in two of these: the Book of Agriculture by the Moorish agriculturist Ibn al-^cAwwam, from around 1180, and the Treatise of Agriculture by Ibn Luyun, a lawyer and ascetic, from 1348. Harvey quoted John Claudius Loudon, who wrote in his nineteenth century Encyclopaedia of Gardening that the plants in Ibn al-^cAwwam’s list for the gardens of Seville were “more numerous than those which were cultivated by the Greeks and Romans”. In Harvey’s words, ‘only some 76 of the 157 or so plants in Ibn al-^cAwwam are found in Palladius’. But the medlar ‘though well known in classical times, seems to have been relatively late in appearing in the southern garden flora’.

The medlar was well known in Europe during the Middle Ages and was highly regarded among cultivated fruits. In the early fourteenth century, Pietro de’ Crescenzi, a retired lawyer and judge with an estate near Bologna in northern Italy, wrote a series of twelve books on agriculture and horticulture, known collectively as the Liber ruralium commodorum. The title loosely translates as ‘the book of rural benefits’. In book eight, about pleasure gardens, de’ Crescenzi described ‘those things which enhance pleasure with respect to trees’ such as planting fruit trees in harmonious rows and the making of marvellous and diverse grafts: ‘many types of pear trees, apple trees, citrus trees, medlar trees, service trees, and the like can be grafted onto the same trunk’.

More than six hundred years later, only fifty kilometres from Bologna, excavation work at Ferrara revealed a brickwork pit, which had been used for a few years in the mid-fifteenth century for the disposal of domestic rubbish from a middle or high-class urban house. A quarter of a million seeds were recovered, including pyrenes (fruit stones) of Mespilus germanica. They were evidence of a rich variety of fruit in the household. The authors of the 2005 paper described the medlar finds as quite abundant and noted that medlars were ‘common records from archaeological sites in the region in the late Middle Ages’ (from the thirteenth century onwards).

In the late fourteenth century a volume called Le Menagier de Paris, sometimes going by the name The Parisian Household Book was published. It was anonymous, written in the style of a bourgeois Parisian to his young wife, packed with advice on menu ideas for great lords and others. Astonishingly, the first, for a meat day, consists of an eye watering thirty-one dishes spread across six courses. Following on from veal pasties, sausages, hare stew and roast rabbits accompanied by other delicacies, the sixth and final course is of pears and comforts, medlars and peeled nuts all washed down with a spiced wine, hippocras, and wafers. In another, comprising a modest twenty-four dishes, the last course is similar, but supplemented by sugar tarts and larded milk. In one of the supper menus, medlars appear in the third course along with venison, dove and lark pasties, crayfish and herring.

MEDLARS IN NORTH AMERICA

Medlars are relatively unknown in North America these days, although they will grow there. In the mid-twentieth century they were occasionally found in New York fruit stores, and possibly in other cities as well. By the late 1980s the best-known produce dealers in New York were unacquainted with the fruit. The scarcity of the medlar is reflected by their omission in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s 1200 trees and shrubs – Where to buy them (1973). The computerized listing of sources for over 20,000 plants commercially available in North America, held in the Andersen Horticultural Library 1987 edition doesn’t mention medlars either. Happily, the fruit is included in the Shakespearean collection at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

            The National Arboretum in Washington DC, which already has one medlar tree, well established and fruiting, will receive three ‘Sultan’ medlar trees from Gerit Quealy, author and editor of Botanical Shakespeare, Harper Design, 2017, to be planted in the autumn of 2022. These will create a Shakespeare Walk through the grounds, the four trees together representing the four plays in which they are mentioned: As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Measure for Measure.

It’s difficult to pinpoint with any accuracy the timing or method of the medlar’s first arriving in North America. The earliest American horticultural works known to us that definitively include the medlar are M’Mahon’s the American gardener’s calendar of 1806 and Cobbett’s The American gardener of 1819. Claims that it had been known in the south, especially around New Orleans, at least two centuries ago is unverified. And it’s unlikely that the trees would have survived for long in Florida, the south eastern region being climactically unfavourable. At least three types of medlar, including the Nottingham, were reported as being ‘tested’ by the Louisiana State Experiment Station about 150 years ago. A report in 1899 on these ‘medlars’ by the Louisiana station is, in reality, on the loquat, sometimes called the Japanese medlar, Eryobotrya japonica. Bearing in mind what we know about the optimum growing conditions for the medlar we’re focussing on, Mespilus germanica, it would be very surprising if Louisiana had played host to these trees.

The medlar is hardy as far north as Chicago, Lake Erie and Boston. The Morton Arboretum, just west of Chicago, has about twenty specimens of medlar, the oldest one dating back to 1937. The Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts has some examples and they are deemed perfectly hardy in central New York. In the West, medlars will thrive in coastal regions as far north as south-western British Columbia and an occasional medlar tree may be seen in Vancouver as an espalier or as a specimen tree.

By 1889 the medlar had been relatively widely planted in California. The California Nursery Company, near Oakland, claimed that the only trees of the medlar that they knew were ornamental trees, obtained by the people of Italian descent for their home orchard planting. 

 

Fruit tree nurseries in North America to be checked for accuracy and supply

 

Home Orchard Education Centre, Oregon: Arboretum where medlar trees grow.

One Green World, Portland, Oregon: Breda Giant, Marron, Karadagskaya, Marron, Nefle de October, OSU 9-20, Royal

Raintree Nursery, Washington State: Breda, Sultan, Monstrueuse de Evreinoff, Marron, Pucia Super Mol, Macrocarpa

Burnt Ridge Nursery, Onalaska, Washington State: medlar

Cricket Hill Garden, Connecticut: Breda Giant, Nottingham, Puciu Mol, Royal, Shilda Garden, Sultan

Planting Justice, Oakland, California: Large Russian

Ty Ty Nursery, Ty Ty, GA: Breda Giant, Marron, Royal

Paradise Nursery, Chatsworth, California: medlar

Trees of Antiquity, Paso Robles, California: Breda Giant, Royal

England’s Orchard and Nursery, McKee, Kentucky: Royal

FEDCO, Clinton, Maine: Breda Giant, 

 

Canada

Nutcracker Nursery and Tree Farm, Maskinonge, Quebec: Royal

 

Australasia, to be checked and verified for supply

Tasmania

Heritage Fruit Trees, Beaufort, Victoria: Dutch, Nottingham

Daleys Fruit, Kyogle, NSW :Dutch, Nottingham

Yalca Fruit Trees, Nathalia, Victoria: Dutch

Woodbridge Fruit Trees, Woodbridge,Tasmania: medlar

Bulleen Art Garden, Bulleen, Victoria: medlar

Garden World, Braeside, Victoria: Dutch

Guildford Garden Centre, Guildford, WA: Dutch 

Rayners Orchard, Woori Yallock, Victoria: Dutch

 

New Zealand

Running Dog Orchard, Ohau, Horowhenua, NZ

Edible Garden Co, Palmerston North, NZ: medlar

Southern Woods Nursery, Templeton, Christchurch, NZ: medlar

Kaipaki Nursery and Orchard, Cambridge, Waikato, NZ: medlar

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Prospect Books
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1909248770
• ISBN 13: 9781909248779
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224