06 May 2025   in  by Katestewart

Preparing the orchard for its new season's growth is done.  The frost is also done, or almost, or so we hope.  The trees are unfolding themselves and the bustle of harvest is some way off just yet.  What happens in the orchard as everything wakes up? 

When snow and frost come less, when streams and becks grow loud, when bluebells ink banks and woodlands and the long grass in orchards and the air smells of rain on earth… my understanding has always been that this is the time both to feed and care for the new growth and give it a productive awakening, and to watch and listen for clues as the trees respond to weather patterns and remember their previous years.

In mum’s orchard full of saplings and teenagers, I used to watch as fritillaries almost creaked open more each day so that you heard them. I was already familiar with comfrey from my days at Acorn Bank, where it grew in a neat geometric pattern in Chris Braithwaite’s herb garden. From learning more during my Masters degree about the quirks of people several hundred years ago, I knew comfrey was often grown in apothecaries and was believed to mend aches and joint pains. I simply saw it come up in springtime like an old friend and knew where I was in the year, but mum liked to make a tea out of it for the trees and shrubs to drink. It had a thick rotten stench that could make me cough, but maybe the apple trees liked it, because every year their branches reached further towards the sky and their blossoms were starry. Horticultural college certainly taught me that, just like people when they’re growing at their fastest and learning the most, trees need most nourishment when their leaves are still crinkled from being in buds, and at their brightest green.

This year in mum’s orchard at Skelton, in the north of Cumbria caught between the Pennines and Ullswater fells, picking up my secateurs again to do a tiny amount of formative pruning, opening up the compost bin whilst breathing through my mouth and taking out oozing shovelfuls, laying down a rich scented carpet of leaf mulch to stop too many creeping buttercups creeping too close, and it saw dad shearing down the long grass closest to the trees’ trunks. For me, formative pruning is a bit like teaching a tree its very first pattern, saying, if it’s all the same to you, focus on the parts of you I have left to shoot and bud, and then, you’ll be able to breathe and be at your most productive. So it benefits us both, in the end. Trees are remembering wood and their movements are more tiny yet more effective than our grandest gestures. The drink and feed they like comes from rotten earth matter, so it shouldn’t be altogether surprising that comfrey leaf tea doesn’t appeal to our senses. As for paring back the orchard grass’ s most tangled growth where it touches the trees, well, you or I wouldn’t put on clothes when they were still wet, and to my mind it is much the same with an apple tree. While orchards are one of England’s oldest and richest semi man made landscapes, and to see wild orchids flicker open in the carpet is just another thing to enjoy, it’s healthy for the trees themselves to have a bit of breathing space close by them, so they can fully feel the wind and the sun.

For me this year, I had always previously thought blossom was magical. It was the way an orchard could suddenly have its own snowfall on the ground, even though the proper snows had stopped, or how on a windy or rainy day it’s almost like constant damp wedding confetti, or how when they are just beginning to open they are clenched into their darkest pink, not ready yet to nurture the hover flies, honey bees and moths. Yet I learned, unsurprisingly it seems, through our treasurer Mark Evens that even something as delicate as blossom can belong in a mathematical equation! If you calculate which cultivar opened at which time in previous years, then subtract the number of days to where we are now, you can almost predict the year’s rhythms. When will the first fruits swell? When will they start to fall? Mathematical calculations are not always so prosaic as they sound, maybe. They tell us how a tree remembers each cold east wind that swept away its petals, how they shuddered when they woke up to the late grip of frost, and how they stored up water because none came down. The life cycle of an apple tree is just as mathematical and precise as we are, in our days and months and calendars of planning. And the orchard at Mosser itself, secret to all but those who know about it, seems like windy Cumbria’s answer to the Tian Shan mountains, the world’s largest and earliest apple gene pool. Its rows are perhaps more strictly manicured than those at Acorn Bank, but even so the prolificness of this craft cider orchard is almost shocking. Nestled in a bowl beneath Mosser fell, which slopes, conical shaped above it, and at this time of year still bare of heather and ferns, the orchard seems almost like snow has unexpectedly fallen into the valley and missed its peaks. Seeing those stars open up feels a bit like a prequel to dusty stored apples, groaning branches, the labour of picking in the year’s hottest part.

And lastly, for me this year, I counted four out of five victories on my youngest grafts. Reports from Skelton that were sent to me told me all five were flourishing, all had fresh green leaves, and Ribston Pippin even put out a couple of tentative white blossom stars. A visit to mum’s greenhouse sadly told me that the most prolific growth was in fact below the graft union. Four of my new apple trees had healed and survived. The offspring of mum’s James Grieve stood stone cold whilst its rootstock alone sprouted thickly. Too late now to pinch out the growth, and rather a sad story, but then again, making a new life so precisely with human hands from two different species, is always a precarious miracle.