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I'm holding a black and white postcard in my hand,

and if you can describe a photograph as moving and beautiful,

this is it. It was taken decades ago. There are big trees planted

into the distance, heavily laden and underneath them there's a flock of sheep grazing. It's a postcard I commissioned for the food program all those years ago

to capture a Britain we thought was dying. The photographer was James Rovilius,

an orchard in Wimp in Devon, but I was wrong. Here I am now in Devon in an

orchard. We were too pessimistic. This orchard isn't

Rervilius's image but it's here and heavy with fruit and I'm with Mark Diacono

the man who owns this orchard as well as the drinks writer Pete Brown, who has just amazed

his fans by going on a journey that's not much to do with his usual day job but before we get to that

Mark do you mind going off and picking some apples for us and we'll meet you again

shortly it's a pleasure well actually there's really quite a lot of road noise today with the easterly wind, so we're actually going. To think about the apple. Do we take this almost ubiquitous

fruit for granted? Well, Pete Brown's been on a remarkable voyage over the past

two years, immersing himself in the history, the culture, the magic and the botany of apples.

And out of that's come a really revelatory book, the apple orchard.

And those revelations are what we're going to be talking about here in this perfect

setting and it's all to do with how we think of the apple as somehow

quintessentially British but the real story is far more interesting and that's

what we're going to dive into.

...