Issue No. 23 — Autumn 2026
An independent quarterly about food, farming and the people behind both
In a Herefordshire valley, Ruth Pargeter keeps 212 varieties of apple that no supermarket will ever stock. She insists she is not saving the past; she is feeding the next hundred years.
Read the cover storySix features and four briefs, gathered from Shetland to Devon
At a co-operative in Totnes, eleven bakers share one stone mill, four farms and a single rule: nothing leaves the oven that they couldn’t trace back to a field. It is slower, dearer and, they argue, the only bread worth the name.
The boats land at four; by six the catch is sold, iced and bound for kitchens three counties away. A week on the quay floor.
Salting, smoking and the slow art of putting food by: a Shetland crofter on the jars she fills each September.
Mutton, barley and a story for every course on the island’s last working hill farm.
There is a particular silence to a table laid for one. For years I filled it with the radio, the newspaper, the glow of a phone propped against the salt. Then, the winter after my mother died, I began simply to sit with the food: to notice the bread, the weight of the fork, the way soup cools from the edges in. It was the first meal in a long time that I could remember the next day.
Continue the essaySix departments, one table: where each conversation lives
Land, soil, seasons and the people who work them.
Latest · 7 October 2026
Cooks, recipes and the long craft of the stove.
Latest · 5 October 2026
Where food is bought, sold and argued over.
Latest · 1 October 2026
Meals, hospitality and the rituals of eating together.
Latest · 28 September 2026
The pantry, the cellar and everything that keeps.
Latest · 23 September 2026
Readers write back, and we answer in print.
Latest · 18 September 2026
In a Herefordshire valley, Ruth Pargeter keeps 212 varieties of apple that no supermarket will ever stock. She insists she is not saving the past; she is feeding the next hundred years.
Hannah Okafor
· 9 min read
Ruth Pargeter among the Tom Putt trees at Lower Wythall, the morning after the first frost.
Photograph · Tomas Reyne
The first frost came to Much Marcle on the ninth of October, and by seven the next morning Ruth Pargeter was already in the long grass with a bucket, gathering the windfalls of a tree her grandfather planted in 1931. The apple is a Tom Putt (small, striped, sharp enough to make you wince) and it is one of perhaps forty trees of its kind left standing in the county. She bit one, made a face and put the rest in the bucket. “Too early,” she said. “Give it three weeks in the barn and it’ll be the best thing you’ve eaten all year.”
Pargeter is sixty-three. She has run the orchard at Lower Wythall alone since 2009, across eleven acres that slope down towards the River Leadon, and in that time she has grafted, catalogued and replanted 212 distinct varieties of apple and 38 of perry pear. Some came from hedgerows; some from abandoned farmyards; one, a russet she calls Mrs Bevan’s after the woman who gave her the cutting, came from a churchyard in Ledbury, where it had been growing over a grave for longer than anyone could remember.
Visitors tend to describe the place as a museum, which annoys her. A museum, she says, keeps things so that nobody has to use them. Her trees are meant to be eaten, pressed, cooked and (this is the part she returns to most) planted elsewhere. Every January she runs a grafting day in the barn, and every year more people come: smallholders, school groups, a pair of brothers who drove down from Northumberland with a cool box of rootstock and a flask of tea.
A museum keeps things so that nobody has to use them. These trees are meant to be eaten.
The case for what she does is no longer only sentimental. As summers in the Marches grow drier and springs more erratic, growers have begun looking again at varieties that were bred, by accident or patience, for exactly this ground. Dr Imogen Hale, who studies fruit genetics at the National Fruit Collection in Kent, has spent two seasons sampling Pargeter’s trees.
Old orchards like Ruth’s are a record of a thousand small experiments that nobody wrote down. Some of those trees have survived droughts we’ve forgotten about. That resilience is in the wood, and we’re only beginning to read it.
Pargeter has no children, and the question of what happens to Lower Wythall after her is one she answers briskly. The trees are already elsewhere: in more than three hundred gardens, two community orchards in Bristol, a school field in Leominster and, as of last spring, a rooftop in Peckham. “The orchard isn’t this field,” she said, walking me back to the barn as the light went. “It never was. It’s wherever someone has a spade and a bit of patience.”
Hannah Okafor writes about land and rural economies for The Long Table. Her book on hedgerow fruit, Common Ground, is published next spring.
More from Field and Provisions
On a Suffolk farm, two Percherons do the work of a tractor and leave the soil better for it.
Why a glazed earthenware pot is still the best way to keep butter, salt and eggs through the cold months.
Twenty years of walking transects on the Somerset Levels, and what the decline of the bumblebee means for the orchards.