An early to mid-season rhubarb with ruby-red stems, white flesh and excellent flavour, Fenton’s Special deserves to be better known outside the Rhubarb Triangle, where it seems to have originated, and where it remains a popular forcing variety. Although its parentage is obscure, Barbara Fenton, writing in the Morley Community Archives, remembers her family growing it in the 1930s in fields on Tingley Common, near Morley, south of Leeds, an area of open land now graced by the M62. It was introduced to commercial cultivation in 1952, and was Highly Commended in trials conducted by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1954.