Orchard

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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