OK, so this is a bit of a cheat. The Queen Cox, a self fertile variation of the famous Orange Pippin, is just a ruse to get the apple into this A to Z, coupled with the fact that the letter Q is a difficult position to fill!

From the very beginning the ancients were truly enamoured with fruit. Apart from milk and honey, fruit is nature's only pleasure laden natural food and apples have been associated with love, beauty, luck, health, comfort, pleasure, wisdom, temptation, sensuality, sexuality, virility and fertility, and stories and traditions about man's origins connect him to a garden of paradise filled with fruit trees.

Though the forbidden fruit in the Book of Genesis is not identified, popular Christian tradition has held that it was an apple that Eve coaxed Adam to share with her. This may have been the result of Renaissance painters adding elements of Greek mythology into biblical scenes. In this case the unnamed fruit of Eden became an apple under the influence of story of the golden apples in the Garden of Hesperides. As a result, in the story of Adam and Eve the apple became a symbol for knowledge, immortality, temptation, the fall of man into sin, and sin itself. The larynx in the human throat has been called Adam's apple because of a notion that it was caused by the forbidden fruit sticking in the throat of Adam.

In Greek mythology, Gaia, or Mother Earth, presented a tree with golden apples to Zeus and his bride Hera on their wedding day. Guarded by Ladon, a serpent who never slept, the apple tree was in the garden of the Hesperides, daughters of the Evening Star. These golden apples became involved with many tales of love, bribery and temptation ranging from the abduction of Helen of Troy to the defeat and marriage of Atlanta. The sexual and romantic connotations of the apple were powerful reasons why apples came as dessert at the end of the meal. They not only tasted heavenly and were good for digestion but were regarded as a cunning transitional aphrodisiac for the pleasures that followed

For many years, there was a debate about whether the apple we know and love, Malus domestica, evolved from chance hybridization among various wild species. Recent DNA analysis has indicated, however, that the hybridization theory is probably false. Instead, it appears that a single species still growing in the Ili Valley on the northern slopes of the Tien Shan mountains at the border of northwest China and the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan is the progenitor of the apples we eat today.

This wild ancestor, Malus sieversii. has no common name in English, but is known in Kazakhstan as alma; and the region where it is thought to originate is called Alma-Ata, or "father of the apples". This tree is still found wild in the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Xinjiang, China.

Apples appear time anf time again throughout human history. Remains of apples are found among excavations at Jericho in the Jordan Valley and dated to around 6500 B.C. and dating from 2500 B.C. dried apple slices are found on saucers in the tomb of Queen Pu-Abi at Ur near Basara, in Southern Iran, linking royalty to the irresistible seduction of apples.

In 401 B.C. Greek historian and essayist, Xenophon was so inspired by walled fruit gardens throughout the Persian empire that he established one on his own estate in Greece and coined a new Greek word from the Persian pairidaeza, or walled garden, later becoming the Latin paradisus, and finally the English paradise.

Around 100 B.C. Roman poet Horace noted that Italy had nearly become one big fruit orchard and the perfect meal began with eggs and ended with apples. Apples moved west with the rise of the Roman empire as the Romans adopted the orchard skills of the Greeks and Persians before them. They proceeded to carry apples to the far reaches of the Roman Empire including continental Europe and the British Isles where previously only crab apples were known. They even created a deity of the fruit trees, the goddess Pomona. Like the Persians and the Greeks, the Romans and many cultures since have responded to the basic human longing for a time and place where men and women are free from the battle with nature for food and shelter. This place is normally symbolized by a garden of paradise and pleasure complete with fruit laden trees featuring apples.

In 200 A.D. famous Greek physician Galen recommended sweet apples with meals as aids to digestion and sour apples only for fainting and constipation.

Around 400 A.D. Saint Jerome, founder of Monasticism, tells his monks to spend more time grafting and budding fruit trees "to escape sloth and the devil".

By 1100 A.D. the Medical School of Salerno was teaching the therapeutic value of apples with regard to disturbances of the bowels, lungs and nervous systems.

Cultivated apple varieties rapidly spread across Europe to France, arriving in England at around the time of the Norman conquest in 1066. The demise of rural areas and apple growing, commencing in the 13th century with the Black Death, the War of the Roses and repeated droughts, was reversed by Henry VIII who instructed his fruiterer, Richard Harris, to establish the first large scale orchards at Teynham, Kent, scouring the known world for the best varieties.

In 1618 William Lawson of Yorkshire, wrote A New Orchard and Garden, the first book in the English language about the practical aspects of apple growing. He is more often quoted on his sensual observations. "All delight in orchards". "For whereas every other pleasure fills some one of our senses, and that only with delight, this makes all senses swim in pleasure". "What can your eyes desire to see, your ears to hear, your mouth to taste, your nose to smell that is not to be had in an orchard, with abundance of variety."

In 1665 A.D. Sir Isaac Newton watched what has probably become the most famous apple in history fall to the ground and, wondering why it fell in a straight line, was inspired to discover the laws of gravitation and motion.

Today there are more than 7,500 known cultivars of apples and the world's biggest collection housed at the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent where they hold over 2,300 different varieties.