As mentioned on the blog last month, this year, we’ve taken on an additional allotment – a mere 40-second walk from our front door. The main aim is a fairly low maintenance productive garden of perennial vegetables, herbs and cut flowers. It’s sheltered, south-facing, and perfectly suited for planting a a range of fruit trees, and we are big fruit-eaters. And so, the deed is done: ten different fruit trees are ordered. They are ready to be collected as bare-root hopefuls this November.
The catch? Our neighbour and landlord, Chris, has a tenancy agreement that’s essentially a ticking clock. When he dies and the house is sold, we have a year to vacate. Chris is fairly elderly, but nevertheless in great health. He saw my setting-out canes in preparation for the coming trees, his eyes a little wide with concern. “Don’t invest too much… they could just kick you off and cut them down”, he said.
He’s right, of course. We could plant the trees only for us to be turfed off the land and see the trees felled by new owners. We could raise trees we may never get to eat any fruit from.
The old orchard
Just as I prepare to take a gamble on the new plot, I re-discover an old orchard ten minutes walk away just over the river Don, beside the old railway line that ran under the pennines, Barnsley to Glossop. This orchard had always been well-tended. We’d see an old chap pottering among the trees many years ago. But now it has been left, seemingly abandoned. It’s a riot of beautiful neglect and bounty: beehives lie empty, trees are collapsing under the sheer weight of their forgotten fruit. I wandered through it this week, scrumping and gorging – firm sharp apples, crisp sweet ones too, and tender, fragrant pears.
This place is a wild mystery. What does the future hold for this tranquil testament to abundance?
With the two things happening in the same week, I couldn’t help but find some meaning in it. Everything we plant, especially long-lived trees and shrubs, eventually slips from our hands and into a next chapter, perhaps left to wilderness, or the next custodian of that land. The trees endure, even though the gardener is gone. They provide shelter, food, and a vast diversity of fruit for any wanderer or wildlife who happens upon them.
I set out the canes, preparing to plant ten trees despite Chris’s warning. I felt a strange connection to the man the planted and tended the orchard across the river. Did he ever imagine how the tree’s stories may continue, beyond his time tending them? Will my new trees also live to such a ripe old age and drop limbs under the weight of their fruit? I’m reminded of the saying – If you try, you risk failure; if you don’t, you ensure it.
