Newton's Apple Tree

The Flower of Kent apple tree outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, is a direct clone of the tree that supposedly inspired Isaac Newton. In the seventeen sixties, William Stukeley wrote that Newton watched apples fall from a tree at his childhood home in Lincolnshire, leading him to ponder the nature of gravity. This particular graft arrived in Cambridge in nineteen fifty-four. The gardeners at Trinity carefully tend to it, maintaining a living link to one of science's most famous legends.