Flower of Kent

The Flower of Kent is a green variety of cooking apple. According to the story, this is the apple Isaac Newton saw falling to ground from its tree, inspiring his laws of universal gravitation. It is pear-shaped, mealy, and sub-acid, and of generally poor quality by today's standards. Despite the name, it is likely of French origin.

Though now largely gone from cultivation, a handful of Flower of Kent trees remain. Most, if not all, are said to descend from trees at Newton's Woolsthorpe Manor, and nearly all currently in existence descend from a single tree in East Malling, Kent.

The National Fruit Collection at Brogdale [ [http://www.brogdale.org.uk/nfc_home.php Brogdale - Home of the National Fruit Collection ] ] contains an example, listed as "Isaac Newton's Tree" (1948-729)

Readers may wonder on what evidence people say that Newton's apple is a Flower of Kent. Newton told John Conduitt that he had first thought of gravitation in the plague year (1665) when the university had gone down and Newton went to Woolsthorpe. In fact Newton seems to have performed a 'thought-experiment' what people would later call a gedanken experiment. In the eighteenth century, visiting Woolsthorpe became quite popular, in the tourist sense that if a way-farer sat under the tree as Newton did, then they would have the same thoughts as he did. The very tree died in the late eighteenth century, however luckily someone has made a sketch of Woolsthorpe in 1777 and that shows the tree. Pundits say, that you can tell it is a Flower of Kent.

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