Apple Blossom

I sometimes think we don't make enough of apple blossom. We get excited about cherry blossom — book flights to Japan for it — but the apple trees in our own back gardens produce something just as lovely, and we barely look up. Bramley blossom is particularly gorgeous: large, cup-shaped flowers that open from deep pink buds into white flushed with rose, like a watercolour wash that hasn't quite dried.

The scent is part of it — gentle, sweet, with a clean, almost aldehydic quality that's nothing like apple fruit. You have to stand directly beneath the tree to catch it, nose tilted upwards, preferably on a still, warm morning in late April. It's one of those scents that arrives and leaves so quickly you're never quite sure you imagined it.

A few branches cut for the kitchen are one of the great spring luxuries. They open slowly indoors, the buds unfurling from deep pink to pale blush to white over three or four days. In a large jug with some foliage — or completely on their own, just the branches — they fill a room with that fleeting, optimistic feeling that only spring blossom delivers.

The original Bramley tree is still standing in a garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Planted from a pip by a young girl called Mary Ann Brailsford around 1809, it's over two hundred years old and still fruiting. Every Bramley apple in every crumble in every kitchen in Britain descends from that single tree. I find that story deeply moving — one pip, one girl, one garden, and generations of blossom and fruit that followed.