My Eden project
Even the smallest garden has room to grow delicious fruit Monty shares the results from his new fruit garden and recommends varieties we should all know and enjoy
Monty shares his fruity success and the varieties we should all be growing
Earlier this year I made a new, dedicated soft fruit garden. The idea was to give a home to the various currants and berries that were scattered around Longmeadow after they were dispersed to make room for the wooden greenhouse four years ago. Like everything in life, what started out with simple, clear intentions quickly became more complicated. We used the supports erected for the loganberries, tayberries and blackberries to grow sweet peas for my son’s wedding in July, and I surrounded the area like a stockade with cordon apples and pears. The soft fruit garden quickly became our sweet pea and apple garden, while also containing a few pitifully immature currant bushes. But their time will come. Meanwhi le, the cordon apples have done everything asked of them. The first is to produce fruit – mission accomplished. The second, and almost equally important, is to not grow too big. Apples and pears lend themselves very readily to being pruned and trained to grow productively in limited spaces. You can shape them into an arch, as espaliers to line a path or against a wall ( great for improving the ripening of pears). You can also grow them as stepovers along the edge of a bed with just a single horizontal branch a couple of feet off the ground, or as cordons, which can be upright but are usually trained at a 45 degree angle against a permanent wire support or against a fence. This training is decorative, making growing tree fruit doubly attractive to anyone with limited space – and that means just about everyone. It also maximises productivity by exposing every fruit and bud to as much light as possible, and means that the tree puts most of its energy into producing fruit rather than new wood or foliage. At Longmeadow, we have cordon apples and pears around the soft-fruit area, step-over apples in the veg garden, and espalier pears on the Mound and in the Cottage Garden. But I also love the full-blown standard trees in the orchard. The very notion of an orchard is a rural luxury, but one I am delighted to indulge in. Even in an average garden, one full-sized apple or pear wi l l make a tree that wi l l be smothered in blossom in spring, give
The very notion of an orchard is a rural luxury, but one I’m delighted to indulge in
shade and structure in summer, and provide hundreds of fruit in autumn. It is garden-worthy in every sense. I have a mix of standards (a clean trunk at least 6ft tall before the first branch) and half- standards (a 4ft- tall trunk), and regularly prune away the lower branches to keep the sightline clear beneath them. They were all planted 20 years ago and are now going from youth to early maturity, although they should all have another 100 years ahead of them and, in the case of the perry pear, another 300-400 years. This has not been a good apple year. We had the smallest crop I can recall for a very long time, almost entirely due to the combination of a -4°C frost on 26 April and last year’s huge harvest. The frost did for the blossom, and a big crop one year is often followed by a more modest result the next. As a result, only the very early blossom or the very late remained unscathed. But we have far too many apples, so we won’t suffer. Our excess mostly remains on the ground, and feeds the birds, hedgehogs and foxes (not to mention Nigel and Nellie). Although we store a lot of cookers and eaters, we must get our act together and start juicing on a scale that would use these hundreds of windfalls. In all, we have over 50 different varieties of apple, and I relish their diversity, distinction and locality.
Beyond the apple
While I think any garden has room for a couple of apples, be they trained ever so small, I also love the other tree fruit we grow here at Longmeadow. As well as our espalier pears, we have an unnamed perry tree in the orchard (bought and planted as a ‘Black Worcester’ cooking pear but quickly established as no such thing, although I am happy to have this foundling as it is a beautiful, large tree) and a large ‘Concorde’ in the wildlife garden. Pears need more sun than apples, but they are tough trees, and in many ways easier to grow because they tolerate more damp as long as they have good drainage and ventilation. The fruit won’t store nearly so long, so it makes sense to grow a range of varieties that span as long a fruiting season as possible, with very early varieties such as ‘Beth’ or ‘Williams’ Bon Chrétien’, followed by later types such as ‘ Beurré Hardy’ or ‘Conference’ and, finally, varieties such as ‘Doyenné du Comice’ or ‘Concorde’. I grow all these and find ‘Williams’ Bon Chrétien’ reliably the best, given our conditions. I have three mature quinces (‘Leskovac’, ‘Portugal’ and ‘Vranja’) growing around
the pond. They started life in what are now the grass borders, but I moved them some 15 years ago and the positioning of the pond was determined by them as I didn’t want to move them again, let alone lose them. The frost got them this year – I counted just half a dozen fruit this month – but quinces are magisterial fruits with a gloriously intense floral aroma. Training them in any way is hopeless. They like to grow as a squiggle of branches, but they can be pruned to give them air and to make the most of the artistic expression of their inevitable contortions. They will cope with extreme heat and a surprising degree of damp, tolerating much wetter roots than apples or pears would. They are one of the last blossoms to appear in spring (but were early this year, so still got caught at the end of April) and one of the last fruits to harvest, often into November. Last autumn, I added a mulberry to the orchard, as well as a couple of medlars to the cottage garden, where I already have four dessert apple trees and four crab apples in the borders. This is my second go at growing medlars. I had a pair of trees in the walled garden, but they suf fered badly from fireblight (they are, like all these fruit trees save mulberries and figs, members of the Rosaceae family, so prone to fireblight) and I removed them. Hopefully these two will have better ventilation and they seem to be happy if yet to produce any of their brown, unattractive-looking yet rather delicious fruit. The truth is that they are an acquired taste, very tart when picked, but like an apple butter if bletted (when they are left until they are almost rotten). However, medlars make a good ornamental tree in a small garden and the fruit can be ignored. They have lovely blossom, an excellent autumn colour and they never get too big. The mulberry has been very slow to get growing and can take up to 10 years before producing a single fruit. Once established, it will make a lovely, gnarled tree full of character within 20 years. The fruit, delicious but rarely available in shops and whose juice stains like no other, are easiest harvested from mown grass, which is why I planted it in the orchard rather than in a border. But they are thirsty, hungry trees, so don’t grow grass right up to the trunk, give it a generous mulch every autumn and don’t allow it to dry out. At this year’s Chelsea
Medlars have lovely blossom, an excellent autumn colour and they never get too big