Things to consider:

Echoed in the disorder Bush has wrought

Monbiot: farewell to apples. From which comes this excerpt:

A couple of weeks ago, I went to buy some fruit trees. I traveled to the world's most unprepossessing center of biodiversity: Langley, on the outskirts of Slough. In the first half of the 20th century, most of London's fruit and vegetables were grown round there. The farms were supplied by specialist nurseries, which ensured that Britain possessed a wider variety of temperate fruit trees than any other nation. Two weeks ago, only one of these nurseries was left. In the 1940s, JC Allgrove's kept a thousand varieties of apple tree. It is still listed in the directories as one of Britain's great growers. But I was among its last customers.
Since the owner died two years ago, the business has been run by a volunteer, Nick Houston. "There are bits of ground here where no one's been for 20 years," he told me. Recently, scrabbling beneath the ivy that now covers the orchards, he found an apple he had never seen before. It was a Baumann's Reinette: the horticultural equivalent of a Fabergé egg. "But I had no idea which bloody tree it had fallen off." Somewhere in the nursery there should be two varieties - King Harry and St Augustine's Orange - that even the national fruit collection doesn't possess, but he hasn't been able to find them yet. The land is to be sold. Nick will salvage what he can and run a business of his own, under the old name, to try to keep the rare breeds growing.
He gave a one-word answer when I asked him what had happened to the business. "Supermarkets."