A ONE in a million, half red/ half green apple, divided perfectly down the middle, has been grown in a Kingston backyard.

Mel Staples said she sent her eight-year-old son to pick apples from a tree in the garden of their Kingston Beach home recently.

“He came back with a bucket­ful and when I was sorting through them I noticed this one,” Ms Staples said. “I was surprised, I’d never seen anything like it.

“I took a photo and put it on Facebook. A lot of my friends were sceptical, saying I painted it on, they couldn’t believe it was real.

“I have a friend in Canada who is a geneticist. He told me about a gene mutation called chimera, where genes are spliced together, but he said it’s very, very rare.

“He said the best way to find out if it is two types of apple was to taste it and see if each half tastes different.”

But Ms Staples said she preferred to keep the apple whole as it was creating a lot of ­interest.

“I was speaking to a local apple grower, Bob Magnus, who said in all his years of growing apples he had never seen one like it,” she said.

A similar apple, half red and half green, was discovered in England in 2009. The Daily Mail reported its owner ­became something of a celebrity with crowds of people queuing up to take a photograph of the apple.

Experts say the odds of finding an apple with an almost perfect line between the colours are about one in a million.

Ms Staples said her apple was picked on the weekend of Sydney Mardi Gras.

“I thought that was a nice symbolism of diversity,” she said.