ORCHARD

A YEAR IN ENGLAND’S EDEN

Benedict Macdonald
and
Nicholas Gates

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates 2020

Map here illustrated by Sophie E Tallis

Copyright © Sophie E Tallis 2020

Illustrations here and here © Alamy Stock Photo

All other illustrations © Shutterstock

Extract from Ariel by Sylvia Plath here reproduced with permission from the publisher, Faber and Faber Ltd

Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008333737

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008333744

Version: 2020-08-12

DEDICATION

For my parents, Ian and Liz Macdonald. The first of whom patiently helped make over a hundred bird boxes for the orchard. The second of whom patiently read through a hundred drafts of the book.

BENEDICT

For my family, who entertained decades of wild treasures – in various states of decay – being squirrelled around the home, freezer and garden with extreme patience and enduring enthusiasm.

NICHOLAS

Most importantly, for Nancy and David. Wildlife farmers extraordinaire, whose vision and horticulture created this orchard Eden long before we were fortunate enough to write about it.

Note: to protect the location of this extraordinary ancient orchard, some names and landmarks in this book have been changed.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Introduction

Apples and Bears: A brief history of the English orchard

January – Nick

February – Ben

March – Nick

April – Nick

May – Ben

June – Nick

July – Ben

August – Ben

September – Nick

October – Ben

November – Ben

December – Ben

Picture Section

Endnotes

Index

Acknowledgements

About this Book

About the Authors

Also by Benedict Macdonald

About the Publisher

Map

INTRODUCTION

Fiery mist shrouded the drooping furrowed trees. Woodpecker gunfire startled my coffee-primed senses. The song thrush chorus sang so loud, it soon became the jumbled chaos of a dozen raptures. The static fizz of a feeding starling gang carried from the fog-wrapped orchard floor. Well before the sun would rise, Eden was alive.

In a world increasingly starved of life, such moments are special. They burn into our senses. And there are some refuges so cherished, some places so important, some corners of our island so unique, that their wonders must be shared. The orchard is one of those places.

Haunted by creatures that may soon become memories – hedgehogs and cuckoos; dormice and bats – this orchard’s diversity eclipses that of most nature reserves or designated wild places. It protects, within its boughs, an ark of animals now almost impossible to find living side by side elsewhere in our dying countryside. Yet, like many of nature’s best-kept secrets, the orchard’s discovery came to me as a surprise.

The visit had begun with another painfully early start: pouring water on my own reproachful face, at five o’clock in the morning, in suburban Bristol; falling into my clothes, and car, then driving north to Herefordshire – the steam of coffee rising. With the sun yet to sail, I nudged my unwilling car into a disused farm gate, bound by twine and locked by ivy. And then – I peered beyond.

Beyond my remit to explore, the mournful sigh of a bullfinch sounded from the nearby hedgerow. Then came the chatter of a redstart. What? You’re not supposed to find redstarts here! ‘Cuck-oo.’ This, too, was the first time I’d ever heard this sound in an orchard. Then, the drumming of one, two, three lesser spotted woodpeckers! A sound of the older countryside, this chorus brought me to my senses. It was as if every vanishing song in England had been broadcast all at once. What started as a routine survey had transformed into a journey back in time.

Looking at my watch, it was still only six-thirty in the morning. Sharing my enthusiasm for this newfound refuge with its unknown owners this early in the day might not endear them to my quest to discover its secrets. Instead I opened my beaten green thermos and perched quietly on a gatepost.

The mist fermented as the amber sun burned the ridgeline of the Malverns. Finally, Eden’s curtain was lifted. This was, most certainly, an orchard. But in place of serried, planted ranks, chopped limbs and neat grass, lay a jumbled, magical chaos. Cutting the orchard in two, a hedgerow of two centuries ago had matured into a line of serpentine oaks. Enormous dead trunks stood where previous apples had perished; encrusted with bracket fungi and cocooned in nettles. The oldest trees were riven with the concentric homes of woodpeckers. The hedgerows were so thick, the sun shunned them: you could scarcely have driven a tank through their midst. This was an orchard gone wild.

Enraptured, I wandered along the lane, seeking the owner of Eden. As the lane turned a corner, the twin peaks of a hop kiln, a building designed for drying hops for brewing, towered into view. A raucous colony of jackdaws erupted from its summit. Before me lay the kind of garden you see in photographs from before the Second World War, or the kind of farm you discover in the rambling countryside of Europe’s oldest corners.

Whatever the purpose of the buildings, nature was firmly in control. The walls were thick with hungry, climbing creepers and rife with brambles. The flowerbeds began to drone with bees as the warmth of the sun broke over the garden. The first small tortoiseshells of the morning fluttered past, as they had done in my childhood.

As I reached a neatly painted door, suggesting that a human might also be at home here, I was startled. Right next to the door, surrounded by a duvet of down, a female mallard was sitting on her nest. Her demeanour made it very clear that she lived here as well. I edged nervously around her – then, double-checking that it really was an acceptable hour, I knocked.

English country landowners can be a distinctive and sometimes eccentric bunch. Some carry a strong dislike of anyone walking on their land, as if you might be trampling on their soul. Others simply ignore you, as you might pass by a sheep, nibbling quietly in a field. When a bright-eyed lady let me in, I wasn’t sure what to expect. After thanking Nancy for her time, I explained how I’d been surveying orchards for weeks – but as yet, found nothing like hers. I shared quite how many birds were singing in the dawn chorus, and how some of the special ones, such as the lesser spotted woodpecker or the cuckoo were, elsewhere, in critical decline. But as Nancy gently brushed the Mogster – a rug-like Norwegian Forest cat – from its favoured perch beside the stove, her quiet knowing smile made one thing very clear. Nothing I was saying came as a surprise.

Nancy and her son, David, knew exactly how special their orchard was – for the creatures whom they permitted to run it. The enormous dead stumps, beloved by woodpeckers, were left not through neglect but by design. The spiky piles of brash were left for hedgehogs: the surplus fallen fruit, to help thrushes through the winter. A fruit farmer, a cider-maker, Nancy most certainly was – as her family had been for generations. But the more I listened and learned, the more I realised Nancy was perhaps the best wildlife farmer that I’d ever met.

Nancy knew not only which trees the woodpeckers drummed in, but in which pile of fallen branches the local hedgehog spent his time. She kept the hedgerows thick and high on purpose, knew which part of her attic held lesser horseshoe bats, and where, in a few months’ time, the spotted flycatchers would nest in her wisteria. Nancy knew that no chemical had touched her land since 1930, and, believed that this might account for the extraordinary abundance of declining species in her orchard. Before we knew it, we had both worked our way through a pot of tea.

It had been an inspirational meeting, and now, cautiously, I ventured the question I’d been burning to ask. Might I be let loose into Eden? There was a pregnant silence – and then, Nancy agreed. After promising to feed back every natural secret of the land she owned – a promise we have kept to this day – I was set free. Like a giddy schoolboy, or Tigger, I bounded through the gate marked ‘no public right of way’ – and out into the orchard. Three years later, I would still be bounding around.

In 2014, I drove east to Suffolk, to work on the BBC series Springwatch. James, my producer, phoned me to explain that he’d paired me with ‘someone as fanatical about nature as yourself’. On arrival at our lodgings, I met Nick. In my car boot, I had a collection of old birds’ nests from the orchard. Nick was unloading a fine pair of antlers, which he’d collected in Ashdown Forest. We’d spend the next three weeks monitoring the wildlife cameras of the popular BBC series. Working night shifts, we’d wait on the edge of our seats for the badgers to come out. In this time, we traded all the stories of two people who’d been raising insects, and watching wildlife, since the time we could first read.

By early 2015, Nick, now a good friend, moved to Bristol to build his own career as a wildlife film-maker. Immediately, he asked where we would adopt as our new local patch. By now, Eden held me in its spell: ‘you have to see this place’, I told him.

For the next five years, we would drive most weekends through the empty, chemical fields and flailed hedgerows that constitute the countryside handed down to our generation. We would pass the ghostly apple trees of one-time orchards around Gloucester, and drive through farmlands so silent that absurd, confused pheasants were the commonest of birds. But we knew that when we arrived in Eden, everything would change. Nature was about to turn up the volume. We were determined to record her every note.

Soon, hundreds of pages of field notes, nest records and diagrams were pouring in. We realised that our one adopted orchard was in fact split into three distinct sections, all neighbours, similar on first impression but each holding their own personality and charm. Between us, we would slowly learn ‘The Orchard Rules’. How it worked. What drove its diversity. Who lived here, died here – and why.

Each year, we have witnessed, marvelled and been continually amazed at the true exuberance of our orchard’s wildlife. The wild bounty of a traditional orchard, we decided, is too special to be handed down in poems or written histories alone.

We will not be the last generation to hear the orchard sing. Orchards should, and must, live on. And so, we decided to share the wonders of this fading paradise with you. We want you, like us, to understand its inhabitants, to share their journeys, to live and laugh among the creatures of the orchard.

Told across twelve months, we want to share with you the richness of England’s Eden – as the changing seasons bring surprise, success and struggle. We want to unveil the beauty of our last, traditional orchards – through the wary eyes, and watchful ears, of just one.

But before we do so, it’s time to share another journey – and that is the journey of the orchard itself. So first, we need to travel far to the east, to a distant land and a forgotten time – where the English orchard’s remarkable story begins with a very hungry bear.

APPLES and BEARS
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH ORCHARD

This orchard’s story does not begin with bucolic, cider-making monks in a Medieval monastery. Nor does it begin with enterprising Romans, grafting and planting apples in the Mediterranean. The story is far older, far wilder – and infinitely more unlikely – and it begins not with an apple but a bear.[1]

This orchard’s story begins in the world’s largest landlocked country: a country most of us will never visit, yet whose very name conjures a blank, mysterious canvas in our minds. Here in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan, lies a world so remote from the hills of our own island that its highest rocks are still scratched by the padded claws of snow leopards. Each autumn here, below the glare of piercing blue air and white ice peaks, a bushy, haphazard forest glows red as the seasons change. Strewn across the high montane slopes, there is something both familiar and strange about these woodlands to the European eye. The vivid colours of the trees, glowing in the mountain light, are more like those of Canadian maples. But these wide, bushy trees also have mistletoe on them. And hanging in their boughs, redder than any of the turning leaves, glow red, juicy apples.

Here lies original Eden. The apple trees growing on these slopes are those of Malus sieversii. This is the wild apple endemic to central Asia and beloved by the local people of the Almaty region, formerly known as Alma-ata, which translates as the ‘father of apples’. These are among the world’s only and last wild apple forests. Ancient trees, intertangled and intertwined, do not grow in the neat lines of England’s more orderly orchards, but cover the mountainside in rambling groves. Carpets of golden windfalls range in size from marbles to cricket balls.[2] By all accounts, their tastes vary even more. On one tree, the fruit may grow sweet and plummy: on the next, acerbic and bitter. Yet over millennia, the size and grandeur of these fruits has been altered and selected. And this is where the bear comes in.

These idyllic slopes, rich not only in apples but in berries, hips and haws, are a foraging paradise for a gardener long lost to British woodlands. Into these wild groves each autumn come dozens of brown bears. The mountain winter is approaching, and soon they must be tucked up, safe in their hibernation caves. First, bears must pile on the calories to see them through the freezing dark – and the Tian Shan apples provide them with just that. In spite of their urge to eat, bears are fussy foragers. Like us, they have a sweet tooth. Bitter apples do not appeal to a bear’s palate, and so, for many generations, they have chosen only the sweetest apples from this rambling lottery of fruit. The seeds of these juicy, sweet apples pass through the bear’s gut intact. Recent visitors to these mountains have found bear droppings burgeoning with apple seeds.[3] And the following spring, from each bear toilet on this mountain, bursts a new, slightly sweeter apple tree. Bears, then, have been cultivating apples far longer than the earliest orchard grower in Europe, selectively breeding the world’s apple trees long before they would make an incredible migration – from Kazakhstan to Kent and far beyond.

The actions of bears on the slopes of Tian Shan are a reminder of a question few of us might think to ask today – why do apple trees yield apples at all? Far from ecological goodwill, an apple’s fruits are, quite simply, an advertisement to would-be seed dispersers to plant its kindred far and wide. But while flowers can rely on airborne pollinators, and small seeds can be carried by birds, only far larger animals can be relied upon to transport apple pips, intact, over large distances. The latest research suggests that large-fruiting trees, such as our own native crab apples, as well as those apples of the wild Kazakh forests, developed, in the million-year time-frame, to attract the attention not only of large animals, but of giants.

Though horses, bears and boar, of Europe’s surviving fauna, are capable of dispersing apple seeds, a number of lost herbivores, such as the Giant Deer, are thought to have played an ever more important role in carrying and planting apple seeds over truly vast distances. Indeed, analysis of the Kazakh apple gene pool has shown that in the last ten thousand years, with many of the far-roaming Eurasian mega-herbivores extinct, wild apples would then have been dispersed far shorter distances than before, by smaller, more sedentary animals such as our bears.[4]

In an ecologically vast timeframe, wild fruit trees would have developed a profound ecological importance for Eurasia’s native wildlife, being planted and dispersed by giants. Even today, the high canopy spikes of Europe’s native crab apple trees are a striking reminder that straight-tusked elephants would once have posed an enormous nuisance to our fruit trees; browsing far higher than any living animal can reach. Yet at the same time, Eurasia’s once abundant elephants would also have planted apple trees across vast swathes of its land mass, by carrying seeds in their dung [5]

THE GREAT MIGRATION

Deep in the caves above the Kazakh apple forests, petroglyphs etched into the rocks remind us that its fruit glades were an Eden for early humans too. Long before the grafting and the unnatural selection of trees, people, with their fondness for all things sweet, would also have altered these orchards – in much the same way as bears. As cores were tossed away each year, slightly sweeter fruit trees, bearing larger apples, would have grown the season after: unnatural selection at work. But how, from this lofty world, deep in the Kazakh mountains, did the apple tree break free?

The next player in our early orchard drama is, most likely, a horse. Wild horses, now confined largely to Mongolia and referred to by the locals there as takhi, or ‘spirit horses’, once roamed widely across the steppes of Eurasia. But the Kazakhs had also tamed horses very early on. The latest evidence suggests that the Botai culture, of Kazakhstan’s Akmola province, was among the first to have the idea of domesticating horses – and were harnessing and milking these as early as 5,500 years ago.[6] If bears and Neanderthal foragers are responsible for the early selection of the world’s wild apple stock, horses most likely played a role in transporting that stock from its remote source – abroad. These domestic horses, of course, moved at human behest – and this is where the Silk Road comes in.

The improbable migration of the apple tree would never have happened at all were it not for the fact that the Silk Road came to pass directly through Almaty province. Here, it is believed that as the parched silk traders travelled through, they scrumped like schoolchildren en-route.[7] Travelling westwards, they would have planted apples with accidental abandon, as they tossed apple cores from horseback. Horses too, infamously fond of apples, would have transported embryonic trees in their dung. Over centuries, this protracted pomenary pooing procession would take the apple on an incredible journey. And so, from an obscure endemic of the Kazakh slopes, the world’s most iconic fruit tree is thought to have migrated westwards – and into Europe.

Only as recently as 2010 have scientists finally pieced together how a wild tree, confined to the mountains of Kazakhstan, expanded to shape the landscape, culture and literature of the western world. Sequencing the genome of the domestic apple, Malus domesticus, scientists unravelled a fiendishly complex network of 57,000 different genes. Tracing these genes back in time, it was found that their origins all lay in wild Kazakh apples. The apples we eat and cultivate today have descended almost exclusively from the slopes of Almaty. And virtually every cultivated apple growing in our country, and indeed across most of the world, has come to us from the bear-gardened foothills of one mountain range in Kazakhstan.[8]

Genealogical evidence proves that some trees, planted by now deliberately, would then have cross-pollinated with Europe’s native crab-apples. While the Kazakh apple genes make for large, plump apples, the crab apple’s genes contribute towards a more robust fruit. The world’s most successful hybrid had been born.

By 2000 BCE, the now domesticated apple had reached the eastern Mediterranean. Apples then headed west – and they arrived in time to feature in Homer’s Odyssey, written in the eighth or ninth century BCE. Literature’s first mention of a deliberately-planted orchard can be found when Odysseus visits the court of King Alcinous; admiring, on his arrival, an enticing walled grove of ‘beautiful trees – pears, pomegranates, and the most delicious apples’.[9]

Apples in literature would soon become irresistible. In one Greek myth, one unusually disruptive apple is chucked into a crowded party by Eris, the goddess of strife and discord, labelled simply ‘to the fairest’. Not renowned for their modesty, the guests Hera, Aphrodite and Athena all think the apple is addressed to them. Jealous fights erupt and all hell breaks loose.[10] In another, stranger story, the nimble Atalanta seeks to escape a boring life of marriage by running faster than any of her prospective husbands and beating them in a race. Hippomenes, however, has been entrusted with three golden apples by Aphrodite, and carefully lays these ahead of Atalanta. She slows down, picking them up to eat them, and this allows Hippomenes to catch her up – thereby winning her hand in marriage.[11]

By 300 BCE, writers like Virgil and Cato were already naming not one, but dozens of breeds of apple. Pliny was describing how fruiterers would auction the fruit on their trees.[12] The Romans had been busy, and were now grafting and adapting apples to their different climates. The custom of naming breeds after important people, or places, such as the Armerian and Cestine, began. As the Roman armies marched north into France, the apple would follow. But even if the Romans had the skills to craft wonderful apple groves in Rome, there is little evidence that theirs were the hands to firmly establish Britain’s first homegrown orchards.

SAXONS, MONKS AND QUEENS

‘Orchard’ originates from the Old English word, ortgeard. The first part of this word draws on the Latin hortus, meaning garden. The second part is the Old English word for yard. By the late era of Old English, the word had evolved from ‘garden yard’ to mean ‘fruit garden’.[13] And given orchards evolved so early in our history that our very language was evolving alongside them, tracing how orchards were first cultivated in Britain has greatly challenged historians.

As long ago as 854 CE, the Vale of Taunton’s Orchard Portman village was named ‘Orceard’, though this most likely referred to a general fruit-growing area.[14] The Anglo-Saxon food-rent lists, however, show little awareness or description of anything recognisable as an apple; ‘æppel’, in Old English, referred to a range of different fruits.[15]

Just after the arrival of the Normans, the Domesday Book records just one extensive apple orchard in England.[16] But now, the Normans, already familiar with the successful cultivation of apples in their own country, having inherited that in turn from fruit-growers in the Mediterranean region, would kick-start orchards as we know them today. By the late tenth century, manuscript plans of the Christ Church monastery in Canterbury show a ‘pomeranium’, or apple garden, consisting of apples and pears.[17] Pearmain, a variety of cultivated dessert apple first recorded in 1204, is the oldest cultivated apple name recorded in English.[18] By the twelfth century, Wardoun pears were being cultivated in England, at Bedfordshire’s Warden Abbey.[19]

According to orchard historian Jim Chapman, the marriage of Henry III to Eleanor of Provence led to a ‘renaissance’ in the English orchard, as the scions of culinary Cailhou pears were planted in royal gardens. Some, Jim argues, like those seeded in the Queen’s garden at Everswell, were radiant with blossom; perhaps more suited to ornament than the practical growing of fruit. It was in part from the royal court that monks such as those of Llanthony Priory received and cultivated further breeds.[20] By 1275, Battle Abbey was also selling cider to the public, and, by 1333, the poems of cleric William of Shoreham record the first known appearance of the word syder in the English language’.[21] Until their dissolution, the monasteries would continue to propagate orchards and spread them around Britain.

By the fourteenth century, the climate was changing. In a prolonged period of cooler, wetter weather, vineyards in England became increasingly unproductive for the monks, who had pioneered viticulture in many areas such as Gloucestershire during warmer, drier times. As it does today, England fell back on the easier route of importing its best wine from overseas. We began to grow apples, and orchards, in place of vines. Across the fourteenth century, orchards would continue to expand across our country.

But after the ravages of the Black Death, multiple outbreaks of the plague and the War of the Roses, apple cultivation somewhat slipped down the list of national priorities in the late fourteen and fifteen hundreds. As late as 1585, Richard Drake, a curate from the Malverns, commented that Black Worcester cultivated pears provided such poor harvest that local people were reduced to foraging wild crab apples to make perry instead.[22] The orchard’s story only picks up again with Henry VIII – and his ‘fruiterer’, Richard Harris.

THE ORCHARD EMPIRE

Henry VIII was notoriously fond of his food. In addition to the bitterns, woodcocks and wild boar that piled his plates, Henry had a sweet tooth, too. He was fond of fruits and artichokes, while Anne Boleyn was particularly partial to cherries.[23]

Henry tasked Richard Harris with no mean challenge; to scour the western world for its best fruit varieties, bring them back to England – and grow them. Close to Teynham in Kent lie the long-established fruit-growing regions known to some as ‘The Garden of England’. Here, Richard established what became known as the King’s Orchards. These were ‘mother’ orchards that would serve as the nation’s repository of world-class apple stock. Richard, it seemed, was incredibly competent. His peer, William Lambarde, noted how Richard had visited the Low Countries, bringing from there ‘cherrie grafts and Pear grafts of diverse sorts’. Lambarde also noted that ‘our honest patriote Richard Harrys planted by his great coste and rare industrie, the sweet Cherrie, the temperate pipyn, and the golden Renate’.[24] England had caught up with the Greeks and the Romans. Now, we too were rewriting Eden and creating new fruits.

From these Teynham orchards, new breeds made their way out across the country. Kent became the first county to receive and grow the ‘pippin’. This word, which sounds quintessentially English, is – we were a little sad to discover – French. Pippin means ‘seedling’. These seedlings were brought by Harris from France.[25]

Across the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century, the overall low point for woodland cover in Britain’s history, it does seem possible that our fastest-expanding forests were orchards, as fruit-growing areas spread out from the capital of Kent. Lambarde observed that Teynham, ‘with thirty other parishes lying on each side of this porte way, and extending from Raynham to Blean Wood, be the Cherrie gardein, and Apple orcharde of Kent’.[26] Few traces can be found on modern aerial maps of this fruit forest, which would once have been greater in scale than many natural woodlands at this time. Soon, the landscapes and economies of whole counties would become shaped by the orchard. During England’s brief Commonwealth, lasting from 1649 to 1660, Oliver Cromwell decreed a national initiative to plant fruit trees across the country. While this never came to full fruition, many further orchards were planted in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire.[27]

It seems extraordinary now to Nick and me, driving through Herefordshire to our adopted ancient orchard, an island of wood pasture forest in a lifeless sea of crops, that the whole of Herefordshire was once, in the words of John Evelyn, writing in 1664, ‘one entire orchard’.[28] John Beale, writing about the county in 1657, observed that ‘from the greatest persons to the poorest cottager, all habitations are encompassed with orchards and gardens; and in most places our hedges are enriched with rows of fruit trees’.[29] Herefordshire must have been quite an extraordinary place to take a horse and cart through in the seventeenth century. To see nothing but fruit forests, especially when in flower, must have been an unforgettable spectacle.

While most natural historians now recognise Herefordshire and Worcestershire as the vital last strongholds of our ancient orchards, we have forgotten that huge apple forests grew across the south-west, too, so completely have these vanished from the landscape. By the seventeenth century, Somerset was an orchard powerhouse. One hundred and fifty-six apple varieties are associated with its largely lost orchards – and the scale of these was remarkable. As late as the turn of the nineteenth century, 21,000 acres of Somerset lay under apples. Devon, at the same time, had up to 23,000 acres in all.

Cider-making, rather than the sale of apples, powered the growth of these orchard counties. By the onset of the industrial revolution, many of Britain’s older forms of farmland, such as the hay meadow, were set to vanish as agriculture started to intensify. Orchards, remaining commercially viable, adapted far better to the advent of industrial farming. New canals meant an expansion in the market for cider. By 1800, it was estimated that ten thousand hogsheads – equating to roughly five million litres of cider – were being shipped out of Worcestershire alone on an annual basis. By 1877, between the counties of Somerset, Devon, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Kent, there were 89,000 acres of orchards.[30] Many of these had been maturing for centuries. In doing so, these new agricultural habitats would recreate something very old and special for our native wildlife.

THE NEW WILD WOOD

While forests of wild fruit trees have not been seen in most of Britain for a very long time, fossil evidence suggests that they once played a vital role in Britain’s ecological history. Aurochs (wild cattle which stood over two metres tall), wild horses, boar, elk (moose), red and roe deer would all have been shifted around the landscape by the predation pressures of brown bears, wolves and lynx. Bears, boar and horses, in particular, would have vectored the seeds of fruit trees in their dung as they moved around the landscape, planting new ‘orchards’ across the wood pastures of Britain.

Salisbury Plain is now thought to have been a landscape once dotted with vast, roaming herds of wild herbivores, such as aurochs, horses and deer. The beetle and snail fossil record suggests that this tree-studded grassland, Britain’s Serengeti, would have been dominated not by dense groves of shady trees – but by open groves of wild apples, cherries, hawthorns and sloes.[31] The name Avalon is believed to mean ‘the isle of apples’, a name given to Glastonbury’s distinctive hill in the Iron Age, when native crab-apples would have studded its steep slopes.[32]

These days, the ramshackle beauty of wild English fruit groves is now a rare sight indeed. But in the oldest pasture woods of the New Forest you can still find crab apples growing in wild formation. Here, free-roaming ponies and their foals graze gently around wild-sown fruit trees, much as their ancestral tarpan would have done eight thousand years before.

By the seventeenth century, Britain had been comprehensively deforested not over centuries but millennia – and this period marked the overall low point of woodland cover on our island. Yet with the wild wood long gone, maturing orchards – spacious wood pastures rich in vital processes of decay – would echo a lost habitat that British wildlife inherently understands. Our forgotten wood pastures, and their free-roaming wild herbivores, were given a strange reincarnation in the orchard.

Whole animal orders which had developed in old-growth wood pastures – from wood-decay beetles to woodpeckers and bats – would have found orchards a new home, and moved into them as they matured. Orchards became a unique fusion of agricultural and primeval woodland – an anachronistic refuge, surviving for centuries after the original wild wood had gone.

In addition to an orchard’s ability to mimic ancient wild habitats, if left in traditional and unfettered form, orchards act as havens of insect life. Malus apple trees have evolved enormous insect diversity over time. At least ninety-three species specialise in living in their branches. When the eminent botanist Thomas Southwood analysed the insect life of Britain’s trees, his study found that much of the apple’s richness lay in its ability to harbour tiny lives – particularly beetles, micromoths, true bugs and flowerbugs – which then build a food-chain upwards from the bottom.

Plants and lichens, many specialising in mature fruit trees, such as the orchard’s tooth fungus, harbour herbivorous insects. These in turn are followed by armies of small omnivores or predators: wasps, hornets, hoverflies and spiders – and their predators in turn. Huge reserves of saproxylic species, those specialising in dead wood, feast around old fruit trees. Delving deeper, you discover food-chains within food-chains. Mistletoe, for example, harbours the mistletoe marble moth, a specialist weevil and four other insects unique to its tenacious tangle of vegetation.

Perhaps the greatest reminder that Britain’s wildlife is intrinsically adapted to a life around ancient fruit trees is the noble chafer beetle. Now one of Britain’s rarest beetles, confined largely to traditional orchards and the ancient wood pastures of the New Forest, its larval stage occurs only within the decaying trunks of the oldest open-grown fruit trees. A whole range of other species, such as the now lost black-veined white butterfly, whose caterpillars feed on fruit trees, or the wryneck, thriving best in the lightly-grazed anthills between old orchard standards, remind us that our native ecology evolved around wild fruit trees long before people planted them here by design.

As so many wildwood species moved into orchards and flourished, our traditional orchards have become increasingly important havens, prolonging the lives of thousands of creatures that once thrived in our wooded island, millennia ago.

EDEN’S FALL

Few forms of agriculture, so beneficial to wildlife, have had such a short lifespan in our history as the orchard. Still expanding in the 1600s, less than three hundred years later orchards would begin to vanish once more. As early as the late eighteenth century, Devon and Herefordshire cider manufacture fell into decline. Canker decimated many of the trees here, but more damaging was the revelation that the contemporary method of cider manufacture was causing lead poisoning. Sales plummeted. In 1837, tariffs placed on imported fruit, which had encouraged the planting of new orchards, especially in Kent, were dropped – and the apple market collapsed. Kentish cooking apples were turned into cider, which proved of such poor quality that it led to protests.[33]

Soon, the madness of importing from overseas what we, as a country, grow best, would begin. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, two keen orchard lovers in Herefordshire, a Dr Hogg and Dr Bull, lamented how the power of steam – now fuelling trade across the sea and land alike – ‘lessens expenditure by cheapness of conveyance’. They note how ‘competition becomes world-wide … to individuals and localities the result is often ruinous’.[34] Hogg and Bull were well aware that centuries of crafting and changing apples to suit every taste and variety, and of producing a suite of fruits more varied than any we see in our supermarkets today, were coming to an end. And so they wrote an extraordinary book.

Published in 1878, the Herefordshire Pomona preserved, forever, an illustrated record of the astonishing 432 varieties of apple and pear that had, over centuries, been cultivated within the county. The lurid 3-D apples drawn by its illustrators, Alice Blanche Ellis and Edith Elizabeth Bull, still leap from the page over a century later, as if waiting keenly to be eaten. From the Sheep’s Snout to the Tom Putt, the Eggleton Styre to the Hagloe Crab, the Bastard Rough Coat to the Bloody Turk, the immensely rich culinary heritage of our orchards shines in reds, greens and yellows from every page. Yet when it comes to the wildlife that once lived in these planted wildwoods, we have often come to realise its importance long after these habitats were taken away.

Northamptonshire’s Lord Lilford, a keen naturalist, gives us some insight into the richness of his orchards around Badby, in Northamptonshire. He writes of the lesser spotted woodpecker that it is ‘certainly now the most common of our three species of woodpecker in this neighbourhood, and we have observed it in every part of the county with which we have any acquaintance’. Of the spotted flycatcher, he notes that ‘this little summer visitor is so common and so well known in our county that a very few words will suffice with regard to it’.[35]

Comparing our Malvern orchard notes to those of two centuries ago, Nick and I are struck by certain recurring stories. One of the great forefathers of modern naturalists, Gilbert White, observes of mistle thrushes that ‘the people of Hampshire and Sussex call the missel-bird the storm-cock, because it sings early in the spring in blowing showery weather; its song often commences with the year: with us it builds much in orchards’. Our notes show mistle thrushes singing by late December, and placing their first nests in mistletoe as early as February. White also describes redstarts as we have come to know them, not as birds of pure deciduous woodland, but those benefiting from the fruit-growing landscape. ‘Sitting very placidly on the top of a tree in a village, the cock sings from morning to night … and loves to build in orchards and about houses; with us he perches on the vane of a tall maypole.’ [36] One of our adopted orchard’s redstarts sings often from a hop kiln – and shows little fear of people. That there are still little windows of connection between White’s orchard and ours is quite consoling.

Some of the best natural histories of lost orchards come from the observations of Kentish naturalists, compiled in R.J. Balston’s Notes on the Birds of Kent, published in 1907. Balston describes the orchard landscape of the Kentish hills: ‘on its sides grow the best of hops and the best of orchards … It seems that birds of all descriptions could find a home to their liking upon it.’[37]

Many observations concern ‘snake birds’, which were, at this time, common across Kent’s orchards, and had been, until the mid-nineteenth century, a charismatic bird of England’s wood-pasture-dominated counties:

The well-known ‘Snake-Bird’ after its arrival becomes sparingly distributed over the county, and is generally found in the old woods and orchards, which are well stocked with old gnarled stumps and half-decayed trees, in which the bird can find holes and large cavities for a nesting place.

Known to us as the wryneck, many Kentish naturalists adopted the term ‘snake bird’ in their writings. Wrynecks, dependent on large volumes of anthills, and thus the lightest of grazing regimes by cattle, were a species that once called commonly across English orchards. Mr W.H. Power, the attentive author of ‘The Birds of Bainham’, written in 1865, observed that ‘in general [the wryneck] is to be heard all over the orchards, and I have several times, by means of a call, brought three at once into a tree within a yard of my head, where they would remain for some time, staring about in the most ludicrous manner’. [38] Today, the wryneck is vanished entirely from our country; traditional orchards one of its last strongholds in Kent – before they were grubbed away.

If wrynecks fascinated those wandering Kent’s orchards in the 1800s, other birds were considered less of a welcome arrival. Into Kent’s cherry orchards came finches by the dozen. But only one bird, the grumpy-looking hawfinch, has uniquely adapted to crack cherry kernels, with its enormously powerful secateurs of a bill. ‘Hawfinches and bullfinches have become very plentiful, and of late years the latter have become a perfect plague to the fruit growers,’ writes Balston. It seems an odd thing to imagine now, with fewer than one thousand hawfinches left in Britain, and virtually none in our orchards, that this most elusive woodland bird was once considered a pest.

Yet even the best-recorded natural history of orchards, that of the birds that once sang in The Garden of Kent, is now just that – history. The traditional, mature cherry, apple and pear orchards that once harboured wrynecks and garden warblers, hordes of marauding finches and probably far greater riches, have vanished from the map. And for all their cultural importance, and the huge areas of our country they once covered, the full natural history of orchards was never written at all.

Throughout the twentieth century, their economic output increasingly obsolete in the face of expanding cereal farms and the reduced profitability of smaller farms for cider-making, traditional orchards were grubbed relentlessly from the British countryside. Vast areas of Somerset’s orchards vanished in a tiny space of time. To this day, the distribution map shows a virtual absence of lesser spotted woodpeckers across most of its former range in the south-west. This bird, like many others, committed to orchards as a habitat far richer, more productive, than the countryside around. But when orchards vanished, the distribution of entire species shifted and reduced on a massive scale.

Since the 1950s, a further 90 per cent of traditional orchards have been lost. As with the destruction of so many other habitats, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has hastened the demise of orchards – as it has hastened the demise of the countryside itself. Across the 1970s and ’80s in particular, many orchard owners have been paid to grub old orchards, in favour of fast-profit forms of farming.[39] Now, only a few traditional orchard landscapes remain in our country.

LAST OF THE ORCHARDS

While the People’s Trust for Endangered Species has identified 35,000 traditional orchards still growing across England,[40] the extent of these, crucial to the preservation of large wildlife populations, has dramatically withdrawn, leaving many as isolated postage stamps within a sterile wider world. When an ecosystem collapses, the fragments that remain are often too small, or scattered, to save; to remain intelligible to the wildlife that inhabited them. Only in a few tiny pockets of western England do enough traditional orchards remain for them to persist, age and grow back over the coming decades.

In Worcestershire, the Teme Valley, the Severn Vale and the Vale of Evesham retain good concentrations of traditional orchards, but those surrounding and within the Wyre Forest, benefiting from its deciduous diversity, preserve extraordinary riches. In a survey of just three traditional orchards in the Wyre, a comprehensive survey recently unearthed the existence of a staggering 1,868 species of wild plants and animals. This, in turn, was extrapolated from the examination of more than 16,000 living specimens within its confines.[41]

Herefordshire, however, remains, as it has been for centuries, Britain’s greatest orchard refuge. Distinct areas of the county act as time-capsules, not only for cider-making but the chaotic assemblage of animal life that once thrived across the county. From the meadowland orchards of Bromyard to the rich cider orchards of Much Marcle, woodpeckers and bats, owls and beetles, all thrive side by side as they once did across the whole county centuries before. But the greatest refuge of all lies elsewhere.

From Ledbury, north to the Wyre Forest, fringing the western shadow of the Malvern Hills, the satellite map clearly reveals one of the largest, most aged and most important deciduous woodlands in our country. Shamefully, it has no clear name – though it most certainly should in future years. Now unprecedented in the fractured English countryside, unbroken willow stands, oak parklands, outgrown hedges, dense deciduous copses and traditional orchards run in fine but continuous lines along the shadow of these hills for eighty kilometres. Here lies the largest concentration of traditional orchards left in Britain. And somewhere herein lies our second home.

Welcome to Orchard. It’s January. The fruits have fallen – and an army of raucous Vikings are once again rampaging across the English countryside.

JANUARY
A WORLD ON THE MOVE
NICK

Rattling around the Earth’s wide pause,

a fieldfare – tentative – adamant

… emboldened by snow-stolen fields.

NICOLA HEALEY

An acerbic easterly tries to claw its way inside my gaiters. I’m glad to have opted for ski socks this morning; the seasonal ‘Beast from the East’ is due to arrive any day. Either side of the exposed footpath lie hundreds of acres of arable farmland – cloaked in a thick hoarfrost. It’s an unforgiving landscape. At this time of year, the open ground offers little of value to wildlife seeking food and shelter. There are sometimes roe deer, and even the occasional hare, but even they can’t brave such brutal conditions. Eden lies just a quarter of a mile ahead, but you’d be forgiven for not believing that if you were standing here.

The remains of a spider web lie draped in the grass – the fine silk lattice iced into a giant broken snowflake. The frost has fossilised the footprints of recent travellers. Big dog. Little dog. Fox. Pheasant. Ah, badger. A broad pad, resembling scaled-down bear tracks etched into the earth. Five round toes, each tipped with fine claw indents. These are fresh; perhaps even from last night, before the frost came in. The heavy clay soil forms an excellent texture for footprints in the winter. Following the tracks, my mind imagines a badger ambling its way down the path: its gait implies a light trot. This animal was moving with purpose; it knew exactly where it was going. It wasn’t even distracted by a fresh molehill; the newly-evicted earthen pyramid now signed by the front right paw of a single-minded badger.

After a couple of hundred metres, it became apparent that Brock had been headed in the same direction as I was. Badgers love apples. This one had been putting in three steps for each of my own. Dumpy little legs are excellent for digging but not great for locomotion. In a conflict, badgers rarely opt for flight: this is an animal that digs up wasp nests for fun.

Finally, variety. A hedgerow towers through the white morning air. Long daggers of sloe and hawthorn paint over a vibrant injection of colour. Blood red, the fruit of the dog rose is a welcome addition to the blanched winter palette. Agile redwings, able to navigate the razor-wire defences of these trees, burst away from me as I near the orchard’s defensive walls.

Tracking the spiky hedge a few dozen more steps, it veers right. And then, without warning, the entire landscape is transformed. Now buffered by the hedgerow, the easterly wind is drowned out as the soundscape hits. The surrounding farmland is as lifeless as the winter South Pole. Yet our adopted orchard is alive.

The scene is too much to process in one glance. Standing at the corner of this sprawling tangled world, a diverse barrage of noise roars from the leafless trees; an out-of-sync ensemble generated by a spectacle increasingly rare in western Europe: a super-abundance of feeding songbirds. It’s like stepping back a century – to the halcyon days of the Victorian naturalists; a scene that Darwin and Wallace would have recognised.

‘Tack-tack-tack’. The repeating alarm notes of a song thrush. ‘Tzeeee. Tzeeeeeeeee’. A greenfinch announces his presence. A powerful little resonating trill fires out of the thorns as a wren deftly disappears back into the hedgerow. Walking further into the orchard, between aged Kingston Blacks and perry pears, a conveyor belt of movement lies ahead. A sweet aroma, the hybrid of fresh silage and a forgotten fruit basket, betrays an abundance of rotting apples below every tree. Taking aim through binoculars, the mirage ahead turns into living chaos, as dozens of fieldfares rotate between the lower branches and the bounty lying under the trees. The ground around their chosen tree shimmers with grey, as these large dumpy thrushes work energetically to pick apart the winter’s windfall. The fieldfares take it in turns – each spending no more than a minute on the ground before resuming watch-duty for the others. The more you look, the more you see. A careful scan of the surrounding trees reveals an extensive feeding flock of at least five hundred fieldfares. This orchard – a postage stamp, relative to the size of the surrounding landscape – is giving them exactly what they need to get through the winter: a seasonal magnet in an empty land.

These Vikings are fleeting visitors. Fieldfares breed in Scandinavia and north-eastern Europe. Yet as little as a month after fledging, the first snow arrives in their homelands. From September onwards, huge numbers descend on eastern England, drawn by the genetic memory of richer pastures. In a particularly cold Nordic winter, up to a million birds can arrive,[1] favouring the more temperate climate of our ocean-warmed island. Today, the mercury registers a brisk one degree Celsius. But if these fieldfares hadn’t hopped the North Sea, these birds would be now experiencing the full force of a hyperborean winter – regularly dipping below minus 30 degrees in a landscape so harsh that in large parts of Scandinavia, even the wolves and elk will move south for the winter.

As soon as they arrive in Britain, fieldfares are desperate to refuel. Fortunately, they are not fussy, with one of the most varied diets of all thrushes. In the summer, invertebrates are top of the menu. Come the autumn they switch to berries – drawing them into gardens across the country as they raid our hawthorns, rowans and cotoneasters. It’s not unusual for a feeding flock to stay loyal to a single berry-laden tree while picking off every morsel. But as these run out come the winter, fieldfares seek out larger fruits, in sympathetically managed orchards where windfall is left. They can stay for months, until every rotting fruit is gone. And if these run out before they head home in early spring, they continue their road-trip of Britain’s top restaurants. If things get really desperate, fieldfares can even be found searching for marine molluscs or other marine invertebrates along the coast.[2]

Sitting watching them, it is clear that the fieldfares are in control of the fallen fruit. Occasionally a blackbird will try to join the melee but is soon rebuffed by one of its larger cousins, often before it has even taken a mouthful. Relegated, the blackbirds resort to forming their own B-team. Under a nearby tree, ten are feeding together. Strongly territorial in our parks and gardens, it’s unusual to see more than two or three in proximity. But here, the draw of the winter bounty leads to the formation of blackbird gangs. As hard as they try, they just don’t seem capable of the strong social bonds that existed among the fieldfares, often fighting over the same apple when it is clear there were more than enough to go around.

Despite being the middle of winter, and with the last of the deciduous leaves well on their way through the digestive tracts of the orchard’s abundant earthworms, many of the trees here still appear green with life. Mistletoe is unusual – an evergreen flowering plant capable of photosynthesis, yet unable to survive without its host. In Britain, this parasitic plant favours broad-leaved trees such as lime, hawthorn, poplar and particularly, apple. Fittingly for the location of this orchard, mistletoe is the county flower of Herefordshire. While this is a fairly recent addition, its written history goes back much further.

At the time of his death in AD 79, Pliny the Elder had almost finished the first draft of his Natural History. His fastidious attention to detail ensured even the ancient Druidic ritual of oak and mistletoe was recorded. ‘A priest arrayed in white vestments climbed the tree and, with a golden sickle, cuts down the mistletoe, which is caught in a white cloak.’ The next phase of this elaborate ceremony involves the sacrifice of two white bulls and prayers, with the mistletoe considered central in the creation of an elixir to cure infertility and poisoning. Thankfully, there doesn’t appear to be any record of contemporary efforts to test its efficacy, but the roots of such a potion are likely related to the fact that the Celts believed that mistletoe berries were actually the semen of their thunder god – Taranis.

The Ancient Greek, Roman and Norse cultures also all held mistletoe as integral to various rituals and beliefs. While kissing under mistletoe is considered a Christmas custom today, the association between the winter equinox and mistletoe goes back to at least ancient Roman times. Between the 17th and the 23rd days of December, the Romans held their most important festival, Saturnalia; it was believed that hanging mistletoe above a doorway in this period would bring good fortune – and peace.

Here in the orchard, the weary branches buckling under the weight of mistletoe appear anything but fortunate. Even the lightest breeze leaves the orchard groaning as its mistletoe-laden limbs creak out a grumbling tune. There is an almost weekly switch between westerlies and northerlies in January – swinging the weather between the first hints of spring and the coldest days of winter. A powerful trill of clicks accompanies this grating chorus of heaving trees, the tell-tale of a true orchard specialist and one of its earliest breeding birds.

Mistle thrushes now sit alongside nightingales and turtle doves as one of Britain’s fastest-declining species. They are charismatic inhabitants of our wood pastures, singing from and nesting in mature trees, yet gathering much of their food in open glades on the ground – and in the mistletoe of open-grown fruit trees. Mistle thrushes are both overlooked and vanishing in our countryside – but traditional orchards are as perfect a habitat as they can find.

These large thrushes may be a joy to see but can be infuriating to study. Firstly, they build incredibly bad nests. Easy to find, these regularly get predated. Secondly, after about five failed nests, they disappear for a month – only to reappear in May, taunting us with a contented brood of fledged chicks.

Despite the apparent inefficiency of the mistle thrush’s nesting behaviour, it does actually appear to be part of their breeding strategy. Indeed, they haven’t mirrored the national decline since we have been monitoring them here. Walking through the orchard after the New Year, I climb the slippery boughs, in an attempt to count up all of last year’s nest efforts. Though mistle thrushes build their scruffy wool, hay and mud nests in as little as two days, these withstand the elements fairly well – so it’s possible to find a dozen or so old nests in a January morning. These invariably have the characteristic signs of predation – a few fragments of broken turquoise eggshell sitting among a mess of shredded wool. A proven method is simply to walk around the orchard looking up into every fork or mistletoe clump; if there is any sign of sheep’s wool – one of their favourite nest materials – there is a near certain chance that it’s the remains of a mistle-thrush nest. Tying a piece of biodegradable marker tape below such sites reminds us of found nests, in the hope that it will make finding the upcoming year’s nests a little easier in early March, when Ben and I start our breeding bird surveys, and licensed nest recording, for the British Trust for Ornithology.

Though named after it, mistle thrushes are by no means the only species to use mistletoe as a refuge. Over the past few years here, blackbirds, song thrushes, wood pigeons and particularly spotted flycatchers have all chosen dense clumps of mistletoe to raise their families in. Though it can be damaging in excess, mistletoe is a vital species – helping to provide winter fodder and summer shelter for the orchard’s refugees.

In places like Scandinavia, Greenland and Alaska, it’s not uncommon for a dense snow cover, or subnivium, to last for over six months at a time. But in most of Britain, it is rare for snow to settle on the ground for more than a few weeks. Even when it falls, it’s business as usual for the rodents that call this ground layer home. If you sit and wait quietly in any orchard between October and April, before the vegetation has had a chance to build up again and there are still scraps of windfall fruit on the ground, you’re likely to be rewarded with a sighting of one of the orchard’s smallest mammals.

Bank voles are common – yet like many of our mammals, far from commonly seen. Similar to their field vole cousins, they have perfected the art of the shuffle-run. There is an easy difference, if you catch a glimpse of a rodent and wonder: mouse or vole? If it skips, it’s a mouse. If it shuffles, it’s a vole.

If you’ve ever played with a Scalextric set and hit stop-start-stop on your electric-powered micro-motor, this performs a near-perfect demonstration of how bank and field voles move through the undergrowth. These little bursts of activity allow the voles to avoid detection from the many predators that hunt them in the orchard. During the peak of the day, it’s mainly field voles that are active, while the more nocturnal bank voles and mice stir to life as the light starts to fade. Now, they must avoid the attention of not one but four pairs of tawny owls that nest in the orchard’s oldest apples, time-heavy oaks and sagging willows. In less than two months’ time, female tawny owls will be incubating their eggs. To create the calcium supplies needed to do so, many hapless voles and mice will be ingested throughout the winter. January is a voracious month, where each of the orchard’s inhabitants eats to excess as February, the most punitive of times, beckons fast.

By the end of January, the orchard is transformed. The first snow has brought with it the first wounds of winter. There really must be a snowflake that breaks the apple’s back, as walking through Maze Orchard unveils a scene of destruction. Glacial but powerful, the weight of snow, accumulating on the mistletoe clumps, has proven too much for some. The frozen mass has acted as a giant lever, bringing some of our most loved veterans crashing to the ground.

An old Frederick cider apple, standing for perhaps sixty years, once held the most flawless form. Its trunk gave way at head-height to three thick and evenly-spaced branches. These then split again, symmetrically, as if controlled by the laws of mathematics as much as those of nature. Reaching it today, we can see the whole tree has been spliced open. Each of the main branches curves forlornly groundwards, acting as giant walking sticks for the central trunk. The limbs lie in symmetry to the last. Despite the damage, the central trunk stands resolute. If the frost doesn’t soak into the new cracks, expanding and destroying from within, this tree just might survive.

Another old apple trunk, a magnificent Yarlington Mill, uprooted in a storm many years ago yet still clinging on, has finally succumbed. In 2016, a blackbird nested in its hollowing shell. The year before it hosted a wren. Now, its empty core lies split and dormant. But already, below the surface, the larvae of the rhinoceros beetle, even in the dead of winter, will be feasting on the dry rot within.

Towards the centre of this orchard, one fresh scar reveals the favourite nest cavity of a redstart. This pair had chosen exceptionally well. Their nest site was so well concealed behind a fold of deadwood that we had passed it many times – not believing such a tiny feature could conceal a nest. Now, their secret chamber has finally been revealed. It is surprising to see that the near-invisible cavity in fact extends more than a foot into the body of the tree. It doesn’t appear to be the work of a woodpecker – the orchard’s most likely excavator. Instead, over the years a slow combination of dry rot and invertebrate action likely created it.

In our increasingly sanitised green spaces – where rotten deadwood is hacked away before even beetles have a chance to find it – a dead tree is seen to be a useless thing. Yet the natural forces exercised by rot, fungi and beetles remain integral to the creation of dead wood in our adopted orchard – and to the diversity of its wildlife.

In Oak Orchard, too, the wreckage of winter is put on clear display. Despite being well outnumbered by fruit trees, the six giant English oak trees bisecting this, the largest of the three orchards, give it its name. The guardians of these pensioner pears and ageing apples, these oaks must be over three hundred years old – a good hundred years off their prime in a species that makes the giant tortoise appear as fleeting on our planet as a butterfly.

Now, just five oaks are standing. One of the giants has unexpectedly fallen. It lies exactly as it fell; a serene calm of smashed branches and scarred bark. Miraculously, an old Herefordshire Redstreak stands almost undamaged at the edge of the oak’s crumbling crown, protected by its giant branches. A white rupture of crumbling sapwood contrasting against healthy yellow-white heartwood suggests that a fungal attack was responsible for this untimely death, likely working away at the roots until the tree could no longer support its huge bulk against relentless winter storms. Four tonnes of life has passed away – yet the orchard’s fungal and beetle armies have already colonised this new barracks.

While a living oak can support over 350 species of insect – more than any other tree in Britain – half of that figure is made up of species using the decaying deadwood. In all, over 1,800 British invertebrates are reliant on decaying wood for their survival.[3] The volume of wood from this giant, slowly being eaten away by fungi and invertebrates, can take centuries to decompose. It creates a critical habitat for flora and fauna alike, while generating millions of mouthfuls of invertebrate prey across its decaying life.

The importance of deadwood such as this is hard to overstate. One third of all woodland birds nest in cavities. Two thirds of our bat species rely on tree holes for their winter and summer roosts. Deadwood has been identified as a crucial part of the carbon-capture cycle, and its slow release of nitrogen back into the environment helps regulate soil fertility. It’s a sad sight losing such a magnificent tree – but it’s reassuring to know that, resting in the orchard, this newly-deceased specimen might only be halfway through its useful life. This fallen giant will continue to support the orchard here for centuries to come.

Walking between these orchard trees – beaten into submission by the winter weather – is a seasonal reminder of the importance and ephemeral nature of deadwood. We seem obsessed with tidiness in the natural world, but the disorder and chaos here harbours life in abundance. When we try to remove this winter damage, we are stripping back a layer of key habitat. Deadwood is one of the raw materials feeding the biodiversity engine that makes our adopted orchard so special. This season is nature’s inadvertent way of reminding us of the orchard’s mortality – taking twigs, branches, limbs and sometimes whole trees as it sees fit. And the orchard will receive many more fresh wounds, before the winter is out.

FEBRUARY
THE SOUND OF TREES
BEN

You learn that if you sit down in the woods and wait, something happens.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

February in the Malverns is the coldest month of the year. As you arrive, very early in the morning, and tuck yourself quietly at the base of one of the open-grown oaks, the tops of the orchard’s tallest trees lie hidden in the freezing mist. Under such conditions, something eerie happens to the orchard. The trees, it seems, begin to talk.

They begin drumming to one another. Different branches, each with a different tenor, begin to reverberate. Their sounds – hollow, brittle, machine-gun loud and right above your head – bounce around the orchard, amplified in the mist. You can, for a fanciful moment, picture yourself in a scene from The Lord of the Rings, where ancient Ents hold long meetings to discuss the future of their kind. The hail of staccato gunfire goes on for half an hour or more, as if some battle is being fought high in the invisible boughs above your head. And in many ways, that is exactly what is happening. Woodpeckers, the unseen drummers in this battle, are gearing up for war.

The loudest culprit is the great spotted woodpecker, firing off volleys of sharp, half-second drumming bursts that fade rapidly in tone. Great spots appear almost demonically possessed as the winter fades. Sometimes, a few gentle taps of a stick against an oak trunk is enough to bring a supercharged male bounding in overhead, uttering his angry ‘kek’ call to let you know who is in charge of this particular grove of Tom Putt cider apples.

Longer, quieter and more mechanical in tone, the faster, brittle drilling of the lesser spotted woodpecker is a more cautious overture. Perhaps once, or twice, as the drumming contest rages, the sparrow-sized male, and female, both of whom drum, may decide to open fire. On many mornings, however, they remain completely silent.

A lot of literature states that green woodpeckers do not drum. In this orchard, we’ve found they often do – but it’s a very underwhelming affair. A feeble rattle of slower contacts with a large, dead branch fizzles out as soon as it’s begun. Instead the green woodpecker has its famous ‘yaffle’, a piercingly clear laugh that, coupled with a show of red and green, renders the male every bit as alluring to females of his species. Violent concussion is not for everyone, it seems.

Indeed, on first inspection, drumming by woodpeckers is one of nature’s ‘impossible’ phenomena. If we attempted to hit our heads against wood up to twenty-two times in a second, we would be concussed long before reaching this stage. A sudden deceleration of 100 g (gravitational force) generally leaves our species out for the count. Repeating such strange behaviour would, over a protracted period of lessons not being learned, result in brain damage. And when we come home from an unproductive office meeting and describe it as being ‘like knocking your head against a wall’, we unsurprisingly forget that not every animal family feels the same way about voluntary head contact with a hard surface. Woodpeckers, however, pull off their head-banging party trick hundreds of times in a morning, over dozens of mornings in succession across the territorial months of February, March and April – with no ill-effects whatsoever. The solution lies in the world’s most sophisticated shock-absorbing technology.

Four secrets allow woodpeckers to do what other species cannot. Spongy bones, acting as a shield, absorb damaging vibrations; preventing them reaching from the woodpecker’s bill into its brain. Rather than the brain meeting the inner confines of the skull, it too is separated by a vibration-damping reservoir known as cerebrospinal fluid. The hyoid, a solid yet elasticated support for the tongue, distributes the load from the vibration. Lastly, a woodpecker’s bill is extremely strong, and does not bend or fracture. I have, over the years, seen a number of species, including sparrowhawks and smaller birds such as blackbirds, with not only deformed but broken bills. To this day, I have never seen a woodpecker with an inch of damage to its bill, and I doubt that many people have. In all, the woodpecker’s combined shock-absorbing armoury allows it to experience a colossal deceleration of 1200 g – and go about its daily business of warning off rivals without a hangover headache the morning after.[1]

Traditional organic orchards, with standing dead trees, provide all three of Britain’s woodpeckers with the ideal conditions for survival: a maze of soft-wooded, insect-rich trees, where grubs squirm below the bark. Flaky apple wood in dead snags provides the perfect nesting site for the spotted woodpeckers, while the green makes its home most often in the dead timber within the apple trunk itself. For the green woodpecker, too, the verdant grasslands between the orchard trees are rich in its favoured yellow meadow ants.

As a result, our adopted orchard is home to at least three pairs of green woodpeckers, at least five pairs of great spotted woodpeckers and, each year, at least one, sometimes two pairs of the nationally-precious lesser spotted woodpeckers. Each spring, just before and after sunrise, the orchard gunfire salute provides a memorable chorus, the more so because its frenzied participants are most often lost within the orchard’s cloud world.

So dense are the February fogs that you can sometimes see no more than a few metres in front of you. Birds loom as giants. The size of tiny goldcrests or blue tits appears greatly exaggerated; a buzzard drifting over the apples calls to mind some enormous eagle from prehistoric times. Quite how dense fog has such an effect on size perception I don’t know, but without any sense of colour, objects appear to take on a size far greater than their own. Here, you also become drawn into the myriad shapes of this veteran forest – and the ancient stories of its trees.

From the mountains of deadwood left over from the winter, to the standing dead trees; from the bee-hives to the lack of chemical application for over fifty years, Nancy and David have maintained this veteran Eden as both a viable cider orchard and a wood pasture whose richness eclipses that of many conservation woodlands. From them, we have come to inherit a privileged understanding of quite how rare and unique the orchard’s woodlands are – and quite how precious its living history.

Since at least 1840, tithe records show that an orchard has grown on this site. The age of the hop kiln, built around 1720, suggests a great deal longer. Due to the painstaking choices made by its owners, this is now a cider orchard. For decades, many varieties of apples and pears, some now lost entirely to the countryside at large, have been cherished and protected.

Of the orchard’s seven hundred standing fruit trees, most of the veteran pear trees stand in Hop Kiln Orchard. This is part of a far wider fruit forest, now largely lost in history. In the orchards from Much Marcle north to the regions of Colwall and Mathon in the Malverns, orchard historians have found the greatest concentration of old pear varieties anywhere in Britain. Perhaps, given our intense history of cultivation and fruit creation, there are more pear breeds surviving here, overlooked in this landscape, than anywhere on Earth. The thirty veteran pears that remain, limbs splitting at angles like a three-pronged fork, preserve an encrypted story that few alive can now read.

Most of these pears are Thorn pears. Of all the orchard’s breeds, the Thorn is the most stable provider of a balanced perry come the autumn months. Several others are Moorcrofts. The perry from this pear is used not only for drinking, but to wash the Stinking Bishop cheese, adding to its distinctive taste. This not only enriches the flavour, but heightens the smell. In spite of these impressive pear stands, which every year host nesting treecreepers, redstarts and hornets, three other pears in the orchard are worthy of special attention.

In Maze Orchard stands the orchard’s oldest fruiting tree. At 150 years old, the Barland looks deader than most dead trees. Fissured by time, it bends outwards, more lateral than vertical, like a child’s broken catapult. It seems unfathomable how it survives, yet each year, perfect Barland pears hang from its branches. In Hop Kiln Orchard, however, we find two of the rarest trees in the English countryside. A Flakey-Bark, whose apples seem irresistible to badgers, stretches proudly through the mist; a craggy giant known only from a few locations. And in the far corner stands the Betty Prosser pear.

So rare is her kind that until her discovery, only twelve were known to exist, all of them around the remote orchard village of Corse, in Gloucestershire.[2] This previously unknown tree makes number thirteen. Come September, the stalks of the Betty Prosser give it away: petrified flamingo necks – pink, arched hangers clasping the pear to the tree. Rarer than a Siberian tiger or Amur leopard, no one, except her attentive owners, notices Betty’s silent struggle for survival. Yet unlike the orchard’s apples, which can break loose in the heavy clay soil, her sturdy roots, like many of her pear kindred, are standing firm – and she puts forth fruit every year.

Betty’s furrowed bark is, even in late winter, a focus of attention for gleaners and foragers. Treecreepers spend much time here inspecting the old pears, curved bills probing every crumpled inch not only for tiny invertebrates but for future nesting cavities. Pear bark peels away from the living tree rather well, and treecreepers, like bats, can squeeze into the most infinitesimal of gaps. The central trunk is riven with the successive homes of green woodpeckers; a strange apartment block where, each year, the woodpeckers excavate new holes to avoid infestations of mites building up in last year’s summer home. In most years, noctule bats call her cavernous internal spaces home. But Betty is useful not only to the orchard’s thriving cavity dwellers. Come autumn, the deep orange perry from her fruits makes her more than an idle piece of history. She is, perhaps, a fragile reminder of how we once cultivated fruits with the same care, and skill, that the French still use to cultivate their vineyards.

The pears form fascinating statues in the winter mists. But with little ability to see, I now turn my attention to the health of the apples, and how they have braved the onslaught of wet soils, frosts and driving winds that so often prove the downfall of the orchard giants. To my immense relief, the Old Kingston Black has survived another winter. This is our very favourite orchard tree; a sentiment shared by its owners. While most cider apples are either too sweet, too sharp or possess too many tannins, which can render them acerbic and dry in the extreme, the Kingston provides a famously well-balanced cider. Standing for seventy years, it is a living ecosystem. Its limbs splay at the bottom, creating a moss-encrusted cave. Here, in the warm, moist caverns of its roots, strange wonders lie. From late winter onwards, from within its glistening dark wood, Stemonitopsis typhina, a cobalt-coloured slime mould, carpets the base of the Old Kingston like a coral forest transplanted from the bottom of the sea. If lying underwater, you would almost expect to find clownfish swimming among these lurid fronds, so utterly out of place do they seem in the orchard’s sepia winter.

Slime moulds are not fungi; they can freely live as single cell organisms, aggregating to form reproductive structures. When food is in short supply, they move as an eerie wave across the rotting forest floor, consuming micro-organisms within the surface of dead wood. While the Old Kingston is very much alive, parts of its heartwood are now decaying. The translucent, glutinous corals gnawing at Old Kingston’s feet are sporangia, spore capsules that will rapidly mature. In just a few days, this eerie gelatine forest, nestled within a single apple tree, will mutate, as the slime mould’s spores are released. Then, the dramatic fruiting bodies will vanish, as new, walled spores delve into the apple’s timber. Here, their actions will not kill the tree but keep it alive. Squirming and squelching across Old Kingston’s venerable limbs, the creeping slime mould soup will root out and consume millions of bacteria within the wood.

Old Kingston’s limbs are so rich in deadwood, in feeding opportunities, and the ground below so rank with winter’s rotten fruit, that we have to date recorded forty bird species within his spacious grasp. Jackdaws, goldfinches, mistle thrushes, redstarts and rhinoceros beetles are just some of the orchard’s denizens who have called his cavernous comfort home. But Old Kingston is not the only special tree.

By no means every breed of apple tree can be recognised in its winter state. Only in early autumn will its fruits give it away. But Strawberry Normans are distinct at any time of year. Proud lateral limbs stretch horizontally like a gnarled embrace. The Normans are particularly favoured by the orchard’s small insectivores. Here, marsh tits from the hazel hedge, nuthatches from Oak Orchard and hazel dormice have all been watched, at different times of year, traversing its expansive limbs.

Equally distinctive, by virtue of the knobbled carbuncle growths on its tortured branches, is the Blenheim Orange. Discovered close to Oxford’s Blenheim Palace as long ago as 1740, this is one of the orchard’s many fruit-bearing migrants. According to one Herefordshire cookery book, the apples create ‘a noble sauce of legendary repute’.[3] Yet like so much of our culinary heritage, the magnificent taste of the Blenheim Orange has been all but forgotten. In its carbuncles lie epicormic growths; the tree’s response to damage or stress, as it pushes out new shoots from buds dormant below the bark. This apple has yet to wake up from its winter slumber, but clambering up it I find, concealed, the tennis-ball moss-green nest of a chaffinch. An ungainly slither up to the next storey, and the frost-latticed threads of an old spotted flycatcher home nestle within a deep knot in the trunk.

Like the pears, many of the apples we have come to know are bucolic refugees in the modern countryside. While their fruits were once famous, and they once grew at the heart of a thriving farming operation, most of these ancient breeds have been grubbed and forgotten. The Colwall Quoining, famous for its angular apples, is endemic to this small postage stamp of the Earth’s surface. The Newland Sack, a Herefordshire breed dating back to 1800, and recorded in the Pomona, has virtually vanished from the Malvern landscape. Its taste, however, is superlative; a rich dessert apple of intense sweetness. Here too grow the Stoke Edith Pippin, the Ten Commandments and the orchard’s most versatile performer, the ancient Tom Putt. Raised in the 1700s by a Reverend of this name, it can produce not only culinary apples, but apple juice and cider.[4]

As little known as these apple breeds is the history of how they came here. Farmers’ wives in the eighteenth century would often bring with them to their new husband’s orchard a selection of favoured apple breeds[5] – and so the orchard’s diversity has grown not only from culinary but marital choice. Likewise, orchard workers of the eighteenth century were often paid, in part, in cider. They were therefore permitted to exercise great preference as to which cider they drank. Their choices, too, are reflected in the fog-filled monoliths around.

Even as the air warms, the mist lies so thick on many trees that sound becomes the only guide. The orchard choristers make life harder still as they bounce song between the boughs. One master ventriloquist is the mistle thrush. In the month or so before nest-building, in early February, it is the haunting song of mistle thrushes – sad blackbirds lamenting their vanishing world – that carries through the freezing fog long after the woodpecker gunfire has died down.

If you hear a dry rattling call from a mistle thrush, and the bird is perhaps ten metres away or more, the chances are you are actually very close to where it has chosen to nest. For years, however, we didn’t realise this, and followed instead the sound of the birds. In all probability, that was exactly what they wanted us to do.

The songs and calls of the orchard’s birds appear most alike if they share a similar portion of this jostling world. Nuthatches and lesser spotted woodpeckers are most often seen sneaking through the tall, dead branches in the high crowns of the orchard oaks. Both have a ‘kee-kee-kee’ call that carries for well over a hundred metres. Most often, after dawn, the only way to find a lesser spotted woodpecker is to follow its ‘muffled kestrel’ calls through the apples. These calls appear designed to carry far, but rarely do they pinpoint the singer moving nimbly through the canopy.

Deeper down, weaving between the dense groves of old apples and pears, comes the laugh of the green woodpecker. This is a bird that should stand out a mile, but like other birds sporting green, yellow and red, such as our now vanished golden orioles, they are, it seems, aware of this fact – and fuse into the greens of the orchard underworld. Green woodpeckers spend much time low down, tucked against trunks. Often, as soon as they have ‘yaffled’, they depart, bounding away through the orchard. They move incessantly around their rotting kingdom, and seldom call anywhere close to their nest. Even though their nest holes, tunnels deep into the trunk, are obvious once you stumble on them, it can take many hours of being laughed at before you get anywhere close to finding a green woodpecker’s home.

Other colourful birds, such as jays, prove remarkably elusive in the orchard maze. Their short, sharp barks, like the rattle of the mistle thrush, tell other birds that the orchard’s best nest-robber is in town, but then the call stops – and leaves the watcher with no clue at all. Many hours of careful tree-by-tree searching, come April, will discover the nests of jays stashed deep in mistletoe or ivy. One, on inspection, is lined entirely with what appears to be a single ball of red string.

Each year, in late winter and early spring, the orchard’s singers play a dual game. Birds are better heard and not seen, and so each utters cryptic traces of music; the bars of incomplete melodies. Advertise too little, and nobody finds or fears you. Advertise too boldly, and you give too much away. Much fieldwork in woodland derives from interpreting, and chasing, these fractured, cautious melodies.

The orchard song becomes more complex when deceit comes into play. A chorus of angry jays and mistle thrushes in an old pear has twice yielded the sight of a tawny owl being ignominiously mobbed from its roosting cavity, flopping in resignation across the orchard, carefully escorted by jays, like winged bouncers removing a particularly difficult customer. But jays, which have shared their homes with tawny owls for thousands of years, have also learned to mimic owls.

On one occasion, I watched a pair of carrion crows approach an area where a jay had concealed its nest. At this moment, both the crows and myself were totally thrown when a tawny owl began hooting in the middle of the day. On closer inspection, the hooting was, in fact, feigned by the male jay, some way from the nest, whereas the female, as far as I could make out, was still tucked up incubating eggs. In the end, my feeling was that the crows were more baffled by the jay’s general commotion than fearful of an owl. Their expressions, in my mind, read ‘we can see you – you’re extremely obvious, pink and blue – you’re certainly not an owl and you’re definitely a jay’. Yet the nest defence was successful nonetheless, and the crows never, to my knowledge, found that particular jays’ nest. The use of mimicry by jays, clever as they are, is clearly not yet as advanced as that of some African birds such as honeyguides or drongos. For example, writing in British Birds, the naturalist Connor Jameson describes similar tactics being used by jays, against both magpies and carrion crows. In summary, he writes that he ‘saw no evidence it was having a deterrent effect’.[6] Pink, blue and very loud, it appears there is room for improvement for jays if they are to fool their crow cousins in the future evolutionary arms race of the orchard.

Perhaps jays could take lessons from starlings, the orchard’s undisputed master mimics. Starlings, wheezing away at the start of spring, can insert into their guttural, bubbling songs remarkable passages of redstart and nuthatch, buzzard and mistle thrush, to name but a few. They can and will again deceive us completely. Being originally adapted to living amid hundreds of different bird species, the natural mimicry of the starling has grown to encompass an average repertoire of fifteen to twenty distinct imitations – but why?

So far, nobody knows. The ecologist Andrew Hindmarsh has studied such mimicry in depth. Of all possible reasons for mimicry in starlings, the theory still being entertained is that successful imitation, and therefore a more elaborate song, may further sexual selection.[7] Another hypothesis is that mimicry simply expresses ‘mistakes’ acquired during song learning, but that does not cut it for Nick or me. The significant time spent watching a starling repeat, perfectly, the notes of a song thrush, suggests something more deliberate. There is, of course, an alternative explanation, increasingly used to explain ‘flippant’ behaviour in creatures from dolphins to chimpanzee – that is, that starlings are simply having fun. But for now, all we have been able to ascertain beyond doubt is that starlings are able to fool us on a very regular basis.

What is becoming forgotten in many parts of Britain, however, is the orchard song itself. Since the 1970s, Britain has lost three out of every four of our lesser spotted woodpeckers. Starlings in our woodlands have largely vanished, retreating in ever-diminishing flocks to an ever-smaller number of our towns. And a host of other birds that still flourish here, from bullfinches to marsh tits, spotted flycatchers to cuckoos, are all in terminal decline.[8]

Those who, like us, have heard the orchard song will never forget it. Its vigour and fierce, layered melodies we will remember forever. But the orchard song grows quieter each year.

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