Profitable Wonders
My friend’s Oxfordshire garden was suffused with the golden glow of a late September afternoon. It could have been the inspiration for John Keats’s paean to ‘mellow fruitfulness’ in his ode To Autumn.
Six years ago, this was an impenetrable jungle of nettles, brambles, rusting bicycles and even, bizarrely, the hull of an old sailing yacht.
The only hint of the treasures it might conceal, she told me, were a few inaccessible, gnarled, old trees shrouded in springtime with pink and white blossom.
There was much hard toil, clearing the brambles, stripping away ivy and digging over the soil of her longneglected orchard.
She now enjoys (literally) the fruits of her labour. The branches of a dozen apple trees bend with greenish-brown Egremont Russets and cookers the size of small footballs. Interspersed among them, three tall pear trees are festooned with ripening Comice and Conference pears, while dangling clumps of plump Victoria plums seep juice through their dark purple skins.
Throughout the year, she shares this abundance of her reclaimed orchard – miraculous testimony to nature’s resilience and fecundity – with many visitors.
In winter, flocks of thrushes, wrens and blue tits pick energetically through the decaying windfall beneath the trees. Come March, bees and butterflies emerge from hibernation to feed on the nectar of the early blossom. Every evening, as dusk falls, bats flit to and fro, eating their fill.
On a grander scale, the ancient, if fast-dwindling, traditional orchards of Herefordshire and Somerset harbour the most widely diverse assembly of life in Britain.
Some 2,000 species of insects, pestiferous sap-sucking aphids, weevils and codling moths are kept in check by their natural predators – ladybirds, wasps and spiders. There are butterflies
(comma, painted lady, red admiral and tortoiseshell) and exotic beetles (the stag and rhinoceros); rabbits and hedgehogs, badgers, stoats and weasels.
In their recently published Orchard: A Year in England’s Eden, Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates describe the hidden relationships between these diverse inhabitants, a self-sustaining ‘circle of life’ that underpins this ecological wonderland. Besides supplying a rich source of wholesome nutrients, orchards offer creatures shelter from the elements and a haven in which to breed and nurture their young.
Here they give pride of place to some of ‘Nature’s carpenters’, three species of woodpecker – the green, and the great and lesser spotted. Every season, each pair chisels out half a dozen or more nesting holes. They will use only one, leaving the rest for others to occupy: blue tits, jackdaws, tawny owls, hornets and grey squirrels.
The tawny owls feed their young with a steady supply of mice and voles.
Each of their emptied, subterranean homes becomes in turn an ideal place for the bumblebee queen to raise her family in ‘a tunnel of just the right width and length, leading to a moss-lined chamber’. Once her offspring have hatched, their voracious appetite requires her to forage for pollen, visiting thousands of flowers every day.
Bumblebees are major pollinators of apple and pear blossom. Still, as the authors point out, the mellow fruitfulness of a healthy orchard is predicated on more than the imperative for the queen to feed her young. It also depends on the whole chain of causation by which, quite independently, those chiselling woodpeckers and tawny owls, preying on mice and voles, are instrumental in securing her a home.
That causal chain extends back still further: the woodpeckers prey on beetles and earwigs lurking beneath the bark, which in turn feed on the pestiferous aphids and caterpillars. Completing the circle, their major source of nutrients are the fruits of the orchard pollinated by the bumblebee.
We humans are the ultimate beneficiaries of this intricate ecological web, where each of the 2,000 varieties of apple has its own optimal seasonal moment of aroma, sweetness and acidity.
After the strawberry flavour of the early Worcester Pearmain, enthused the doyen of pomology Edward Bunyard, comes the ‘melting, almost marrowy flesh and juiciness’ of James Grieve, the aniseed-scented Ellison’s Orange and the ‘very attar of apples’, the Gravenstein. In November, there’s the Cox he judged to be ‘the Château d’yquem [the most sublime and costly of sweet white wines] of apples’. December is the high point for the ‘nutty, warm aroma’ of the Blenheim Orange.
Meanwhile, my friend, overwhelmed by her surplus of mellow fruitfulness, has bought a fruit press with which she makes a delicious, wholesome elixir of pear and apple juice.