Book Notes: Growing Fruit, by Chris Whitelock

Published in September 2025, Chris Whitelock’s Growing Fruit, A Practical Guide to Top and Soft Fruit, from The Crowood Press, is the latest addition to the ranks of hands-on guides to selecting, planting, establishing and maintaining fruit trees and bushes. It’s intended for the amateur gardener or orchard enthusiast, and I think it’s a particularly good example of the genre.

Chris Whitelock is as an RHS Qualifications tutor and examiner, and a freelance horticultural consultant with fifty years’ experience under his belt, and the breadth of his background knowledge really shines through in the clear, concise presentation of the information in Growing Fruit.

From the introduction onwards, Whitelock explains that he has deliberately pitched the tone and content of this book for the beginner fruit gardener or allotment holder, and throughout the volume he consistently presents key facts and essential information without unnecessary preamble or over-elaboration. In the rest of the introduction he lays out the strong environmental case for domestic- or amateur-scale fruit growing, before moving on to the main point of the book: providing sensible, solid advice on how to get set up and started.

The first few chapters contain good general advice on selecting appropriate fruit types, and trees suitable for smaller spaces, with an emphasis on the importance of buying trees on dwarfing rootstocks in order to grow cordons, columnar trees, potted trees and soft fruit bushes, either freestanding or against walls, in the restricted space of the average garden or allotment plot.

Further sound advice follows, on the subject of choosing and buying the necessary tools and equipment – “buy cheap, buy twice” has definitely been added to my list of mantras – including secateurs, saws, ladders and sprayers, and then maintaining them properly once you’re using them regularly. Whitelock then explains the best way to source good quality fruit trees on an appropriate rootstock for the size of the tree you’d like to grow, stressing that they should ideally come from a specialist nursery, or a local garden centre if there isn’t a specialist near you. He also adds a warning to avoid buying bargain trees from supermarkets, unless getting the lowest price really is your over-riding concern, which is a suggestion I can really get behind.

The next major portion of the book outlines the essentials of the key practical elements of fruit growing. There’s an overview of the most common trained tree forms, a best-practice method for planting fruit trees and bushes, information on how to protect trees from deer and rabbits, and suggestions as to how and when to irrigate and fertilise newly-planted trees. Whitelock also covers the grafting of new fruit trees, gives his recommendations on sourcing scions, and provides an overview of the whip-and-tongue, saddle, cleft, t-bud and chip-bud grafting methods, all of which are accompanied by good, clear, diagrams.

The rest of the book consists of chapters on the major fruit types commonly grown in the the U.K.: apple, pear, plum, cherry, strawberry, cane fruits (raspberry and blackberry), bush fruits (gooseberry, red-, black- and white-currants, jostaberry, blueberry), and outdoor vines. Each chapter provides a brief history of that fruit type’s cultivation in the U.K., a selection of popular UK varieties, details on pollination requirements, pests, disorders and diseases, and detailed, practical tips on pruning, training, watering and feeding of fruit trees, as well as the thinning, harvesting and storing of their fruit.

The advice that Chris Whitelock’s provides throughout Growing Fruit is old-school and by-the-book, with very traditional, sensible, standardised methods of the sort that have been tried-and-tested for decades, if not centuries. These methods do work, and generally work reasonably well for the average fruit garden, which is why they’ve stood the test of time, although it’s fair to say that they’re not completely optimal for all outcomes in all growing situations. But as Whitelock himself points out several times, in Growing Fruit he is presenting deliberately simplified and condensed information that’s pitched at entry-level and intended as an introduction rather than a comprehensive guide to all the available alternatives.

Which is why I’d suggest that if you’re an intermediate-level fruit grower with a few years’ experience under your belt who’s looking for a more in-depth investigation of particular topics, then this probably won’t be the volume for you. Growing Fruit does contain a few interesting pointers for further investigation and study – for instance, the author mentions the role of plant hormones in influencing regrowth patterns, which is something that can be said for very few writers of similar books – but more detailed information on this sort of subject will have to be looked for elsewhere.

But if you are a fruit-growing novice looking for a good, all-round guide to the basic principles of fruit growing, with clear, concise instructions, plenty of diagrams, and enough explanation to cover the essentials without bombarding you with too much detail, then yes, absolutely, Growing Fruit is a very good starter volume and well worth the cover price. Reading and referring to it will definitely get you up to beginners’ speed.

I’ll be adding Chris Whitelock’s Growing Fruit to the list of introductory books that I recommend when I give talks on pruning and grafting, and I’m sure I’ll be referring to it myself, next time I feel the need to refresh my knowledge of the essentials.

Growing Fruit, A Practical Guide to Top and Soft Fruit by Chris Whitelock is published by by The Crowood Press, (r.r.p. £18.99).

You can order a copy direct from the publisher, via Amazon.co.uk (Affiliate Link)¹If you buy a copy of the book via this affiliate link, I’ll earn a small referral fee, which I promise to put towards buying more orchard-related books. and it should also be available from a number of independent high street and/or online booksellers.

My thanks to The Crowood Press for sending me a pdf copy of the book to review.

Footnotes

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  If you buy a copy of the book via this affiliate link, I’ll earn a small referral fee, which I promise to put towards buying more orchard-related books. ↩︎