The coming season’s apricots: ‘Rival’ – an American-bred variety raised by Washington State University’s Tom Toyoma who published his first paper about it in 1971.

It was later described by Jack Staub in his ‘75 remarkable fruits for your garden’ for its superior yield of ‘really enchanting fruit’. Our trees at 540 metres have reached 3m in height in four years and this season carry buds in profusion.

The word ‘rival’ derives from rivus ‘brook’, in turn from the proto-Indo-European root pei – ‘to run, flow’.