February 27 25
THE ORCHARD DIARY 1st Month
March 9 25
Blog by Lynne Pearl
I just wrote about the hellebores and snowdrops and daffodils last month:
The sun was shining on the conference centre’s garden, the orchard had been asleep since all the apples fell last September. But in the sunshine there is a sign of life, snowdrops, like little points of light under the mountainside, over there in the garden-orchard.
This orchard though is part of what must surely have once been a grand farm. The trees are pollarded so that when the apples ripen they don’t have very far to fall and in fact standing under the branches one just reaches up and there you are, all the apples you could want. But does anyone eat these apples anymore?
So I am going to keep an account on these trees and their summer and winter. I’ve never had an orchard before, and although it isn’t strictly speaking mine I see it often, as I go by on the way to something else, a meeting, a piece of work a day of teaching. So this way I can keep track of growth and change over a year
Unlike the orchards at Whimple which are forgotten, mostly ignored but not actually neglected this is a living orchard tended to by Fr Frank and Br Terry. I bet they make sure the grass is cut and the weeds are weeded from underneath their trunks. Someone is definitely planting flowers at their base and tend them so that there are flowers for every season in this orchard.
At Whimple the orchards were for a purpose for the local people to work there. They were there to make a famous cider that was renown all over the country. But something happened, maybe people didn’t want the cider anymore, other drinks became fashionable or foreign apples got cheaper, but times changed and the apples were no longer needed and so they weren’t harvested and cider wasn’t made. But the trees are still there, I see them almost daily and look at them in the sun and rain, patient every day, gnarled with age and waiting. Maybe they believe their time will come again when their fruit is needed and loved for its delicacy once again. Who knows? Times change ever, and just when we aren’t expecting or cannot imagine, they change and there you are…
Today there are no leaves on the trees, just the bare grey winter bark. It is very sunny today, warm even. The trees are just like sticks, but the banks are warming up. The far edge of the orchard has a bank falling into the lane outside the orchard where you can walk and a car can just get through. On that bank all manner of flowers grow, probably because it is the best spot in the garden, daffodils and snowdrops, the first.
The earth is just hard. The grass isn’t growing, but there also aren’t any weeds. It’s a small orchard just nine trees laid out equidistant. But this was probably just right for the original occupants of the manor house.
How old are these trees? What is the history of this farm, if that is what it was, before it became what it is today, a hospitable place for all comers, seeking rest and quiet.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7796332.Lynne_Pearl
Hay Tor, Dartmoor by Cath Whitehead