My Spider Wort with Granny Smith Apple Green Foliage

Of all the plants in my Cottage Garden, this is the one I get asked about the most. Everyone loves the color! It was given to me by a friend and that makes it even more special!

Granny Smith Apple has been a part of the Crayola series since 1993. In the “Colors of Baltimore” series it is known as Francis Scott Key Lime and in the “State Crayon Collection,” it is known as Sacra-mint-o, the color for California.

I wanted to know who Granny Smith was and more about her apples, don’t you? Maria Ann Sherwood was born in 1799 in Peasmarsh, Sussex, England. She was the daughter of John Sherwood, a farm laborer, and his wife Hannah. Maria worked as a farm laborer and married a farm laborer, Thomas Smith. Both were illiterate. The Smiths lived is Sussex for the next nineteen years, before they migrated to New South Wales as free settlers, arriving in Sydney in 1838. Thomas found employment in the fruit-growing district near Ryde.  He and Maria remained in the district for the rest of their lives working on the 24 acres of land they had purchased for an orchard.

Maria also went to the market where she sold her homemade fruit pies, for which she was widely known.

In 1868, a wholesaler at the Sydney markets gave Maria a box of French crab apples, grown in Tasmania, to use in her pies. After using them, she discarded the remaining peels and seeds onto a compost heap near a creek on her farm. Some months later, she observed a pippin growing from the compost. She tended it carefully and it bore fruit. In 1876, following Maria and Thomas’ death, local orchardist Edward Gallard, bought part of the Smith Farm and developed the ‘Granny Smith’ seedling, planting a large number of these trees from which he marketed a crop annually until his death in 1914. The cultivar was named “Granny” Smith in honor of the old lady who had first cultivated it. I’m glad he named the apple after her!

This post is just one of many in the Color Your World: 120 Days of Crayola Challenge! Enjoy!