A dessert apple of first-rate quality. Ripe in the beginning of August. The tree is a vigorous and luxuriant grower, and a good bearer.
207. LEMON PIPPIN.—Fors.
- Identification.—[Fors. Treat.] 112. [Hort. Soc. Cat.] ed. 3, n. 406. [Lind. Guide], 75. [Down. Fr. Amer.] 115. [Rog. Fr. Cult], 81.
- Synonymes.—Kirke’s Lemon Pippin, [Hort. Soc. Cat.] ed. 1, 551. Quince, [Rog. Fr. Cult.] 66. Englischer Winterquittenapfel, [Diel Kernobst.] ii. B. 21.
- Figures.—[Pom. Mag.] t. 37. [Ron. Pyr. Mal.] pl. ix. f. 4.
Fruit, medium sized; oval, with a large fleshy elongation covering the stalk, which gives it the form of a lemon. Skin, pale yellow tinged with green, changing to a lemon yellow as it attains maturity, strewed with russety freckles, and patches of thin delicate russet. Eye, small, and partially open, with short segments, and set in an irregular basin, which is frequently higher on one side than the other. Stalk, short, entirely covered with a fleshy elongation of the fruit. Flesh, firm, crisp, and briskly flavored.
A very good apple, either for culinary or dessert use; it is in season from October to April, and is perhaps the most characteristic apple we have, being sometimes so much like a lemon, as at first sight to be taken for that fruit. Forsyth says it is excellent for drying.
The tree does not attain a large size; but is healthy, hardy, and a good bearer.
It is uncertain at what period the Lemon Pippin was first brought into notice. Rogers calls it the “Quince Apple,” and, if it is what has always been known under that name, it must be of considerable antiquity, being mentioned by Rea, Worlidge, Ray, and almost all the early writers; but the first instance wherein we find it called Lemon Pippin, is in Ellis’s “Modern Husbandman” 1744, where he says it is “esteemed so good an apple for all uses, that many plant this tree preferable to all others.”