How ‘Lady’ Maud found a great Australian apple

By Susan Broomhall

ON Boronia Farm, just outside Donnybrook in WA, stands an 80-something-year-old apple tree (Malus domestica) that’s at the heart of a global industry.

This tree produced an apple no one had seen or tasted before, now called the Lady Williams. Without the Lady Williams, there could be no Sun downer, no Pink Lady, no Bravo – apple varieties that, along with the Lady Williams, have made an enormous con tribution to the global apple industry.

Boronia Farm’s apple tree is now listed in the register of the National Trust, but the woman behind the Lady Williams is not well known. Yet, as her son Bob remembered, Maud Williams was crucial to the story of this tree and the apple it produced.

From the ‘30s, Maud, her husband Arthur and their two boys Bob and Ron worked their five hectares of or chard, with its apples and stone fruit, and 40 cows.

Maud collected ideas for plants to grow, from catalogues and women’s magazines, experimenting with her taste for the unusual, remembers her son Ron. Not content with roses and petunias, Maud was instead growing feijoas and hydrangeas.

With her eye for horticultural nov- the family propagated new trees from the original one.

This tree was a chance seedling, a spontaneous creation whose likely parent cultivars were Granny Smith and Rokewood.

Some of our most common apple