More Moorpark (apricots) please

 Apricot jam, bottled apricots and fresh Moorpark apricots

Our larger Moorpark apricot tree has produced about 10 kilograms of beautiful fruit this year, and we have been enjoying fresh apricots for breakfast and dessert for about three weeks. We had to pick most of the fruit a little under-ripe due to the plethora of avian apricot-appreciators in these parts. Fortunately these fruit are fine for making jam or bottling, and we could not have eaten 10kg of fresh fruit before it started to rot anyway.

I have grown other varieties of apricot, but none of them have ever cropped as heavily or as consistently as the Moorpark, which reliably produces a reasonable amount of good-sized fruit every year if it escapes late frosts and/or hailstorms at the critical pollination and fruit formation times. 

 Moorpark apricots from a Suffolk garden, photographed for 

'The Orchard and Fruit Garden A new Pomona of hardy and sub-tropical fruits'  (and supplemented with two from my garden).

I read what H. Denham (C.B.E., M.A., D.Sc. (Oxon) ) had to say on apricots in general and the Moorpark variety in particular in my beautifully-illustrated fruit book, The Orchard and Fruit Garden A new Pomona of hardy and sub-tropical fruits (edited by Edward Hyams and A.A. Jackson, Longmans, 1961). According to Dr Denham the Moorpark was first offered for sale under that name in England in 1788, although various experts believe it was in the country earlier and being grown under other names. It acquired its name from being grown on a country estate named Moor Park. I knew it was a very old variety from having seen it mentioned in one of Jane Austen's novels (no, I can't remember which one). Nor do I know who brought it to New Zealand, and when, but since it was so popular in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries I would guess it was an early import.

An apricot by any other name – and minus the history – might indeed taste as sweet as a fully-ripe Moorpark plucked straight from the tree, but knowing that I am growing a variety that has been known and loved by home gardeners for more than two centuries satisfies my heart as well as my tastebuds.