The Orchard at the End of the Lane

The lane to Margaret Ellery’s orchard is not so much a lane as a suggestion — two ruts of red Herefordshire clay, a hawthorn hedge that has been laid and relaid since before the war, and, at the far end, a five-bar gate held shut with baler twine. On the morning I arrive, in the second week of September, the gate is open and a wheelbarrow of windfalls stands beside it with a hand-lettered sign: Take what you want. They’re only going to rot.

Ellery is eighty-one. She has lived here since 1979, when she and her late husband, David, bought four acres of neglected cider orchard for less than the price of a family car. The trees were dying then, she tells me, as we walk between rows so heavy with fruit that some of the branches are propped on forked hazel poles. “Everyone said grub them out and put the land to grass. Grass was where the money was. I said, well, let’s see what they are first.”

What they were, it turned out, was a small and largely forgotten archive. Among the familiar cider trees were varieties that nobody at the county agricultural college could name — a russet with a flush like a bruise, a long, ribbed green apple that kept until Easter. Ellery began taking cuttings, writing letters, visiting other old orchards with a notebook and a pair of secateurs. Forty-seven years later she grows 212 varieties, at least nineteen of which, as far as anyone can tell, exist nowhere else.

“People call it a collection,” she says, a little irritably, stooping to pick up an apple, turning it over, and dropping it into the pocket of a waxed jacket older than I am. “It isn’t. A collection is something you keep in a cabinet. These have to be grafted, pruned, fed, picked, pressed, eaten. If you stop doing it for five years, they go. It’s not a museum. It’s a job.”

❦A job with no successor

It is also a job that, at present, nobody is lined up to do. Ellery has no children. Her nearest relatives live in Toronto and have, she says with neither bitterness nor surprise, “no interest in mud”. The land itself is worth more as a building plot than it will ever earn in apples; an agent from Ledbury has written to her three times this year. She keeps the letters on the kitchen windowsill, under a jar of quince jelly, where she can see them.

A collection is something you keep in a cabinet. These have to be grafted, pruned, picked and eaten. It’s not a museum. It’s a job.

Margaret Ellery

Britain has lost, by most estimates, more than half of its traditional orchards since the 1950s. The figure is quoted so often that it has become a kind of weather — regrettable, unchangeable, nobody’s fault. What it does not capture is the way the loss actually happens: not in a single season of bulldozers but tree by tree, keeper by keeper, as the people who knew which apple was which grow old, and the knowledge goes into the ground with them.

Ellery’s own knowledge is kept in a run of hardback notebooks on a shelf beside the Rayburn — thirty-one of them, each covering a season or two, filled in a small upright hand. She lets me read from one, dated October 1986.

Tree 14, row C, the one D. calls the Parson. Fruit small, flat, very russeted, sharp at picking, but by December it tastes of pear drops and wet hay. Nobody at the show knew it. Mr Pritchard thought it might be a seedling of something older but would not swear. Took six scions. Must ask Joan whether her mother had one at Much Marcle.

❦What the trees remember

“The Parson” is still there, in row C, its trunk now split and hollow and bound with a steel band. Ellery found its twin in 1991, in the garden of a retired schoolmaster in Much Marcle; there is, so far as she knows, no third. When I bite into one of its apples — small, rough-skinned, the colour of an old penny — it is too sharp to enjoy. “Of course it is,” she says. “It’s September. Come back at Christmas.”

It is said lightly, as an invitation. It is also, I realise later, driving back down the lane with a carrier bag of windfalls on the passenger seat, the whole problem in four words. Every apple in this orchard needs someone to come back — at Christmas, next spring, in twenty years — and the question that hangs over the four acres at the end of the lane is not whether the trees are worth saving, but who, exactly, will be here to taste them when they are ready.