Granny Smith
apple cultivar that produces cooking apples which are also sour eating apples
The Granny Smith is an apple cultivar that originated in Australia in 1868. It is named after Maria Ann Smith, who propagated the cultivar from a chance seedling. The tree is thought to be a hybrid of Malus sylvestris, the European wild apple, with the domesticated apple Malus domestica as the polleniser.
The fruit is hard and firm with light green skin and has crisp, juicy flesh. The flavour is tart, often sour and acidic. It remains firm and mostly sweet when baked, making it a popular cooking apple used in pies, where it can be sweetened even further. The apple goes from being completely green to turning yellow when overripe. USApple Association reported in 2019 that the Granny Smith was the third most popular apple in the United States.
History
The Granny Smith cultivar originated in Eastwood, New South Wales, Australia (now a suburb of Sydney) in 1868. Its discoverer, Maria Ann Smith (née Sherwood), had emigrated to the district from Beckley, East Sussex in 1839 with her husband Thomas.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Granny Smith” as apple cultivar that produces cooking apples which are also sour eating apples. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q506040. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1868, 2019 and 1839.
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This entry incorporates text from “Granny Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.