Old Laughing Lady and her Lover

At noon we were picking plums in the Evening Orchard which has many plum trees, most of them oddities, crosses and wild damsons but the centrepiece of this old orchard is a grand old lady and this year the branches quite literally drip with clusters of fat, purpling beasts. The old lady has suffered neglect over the years and so is infested with coddling moths. This year is no different, but her crop is up and the proportion of infested plums is down. Another year and, perhaps, we'll have brought her back to her stately best. But still, we call this the Evening Orchard because its trees are in their twilight. A couple of years ago we wassailed the trees for fun and left a stoneware goblet of wine in her branches. We found it again as we pushed the birthing-ladder into her loins and reached out between two branches toward one of the apple trees which is dormant this year.

Not just dormant. It has a touch of fire-blight which it has fought without aid, but sits at a dangerous threshold. When we arrived, the trees ended at this line. Over several dark evenings we planted another line of espalliers at the edge of the old catchwater drain and, despite the head shaking of the local nay-sayers, this night planted orchard has thrived. But further up, there is a bloody line across the old orchard where the drainage fails and the winter waters gather. The dormant apple sits on one side, and the ruin of a newly planted pear sits on the other. Last year, the new pear was well away and this year it set fruit. Now it has all but died. For months I've been trimming away infected branches and for months, like an advancing army, the fireblight has killed another branch. The cruelty of it stings. The blight had set in the middle of the tree and the top four feet, all the new growth, was fine. Desperate to save the new growth, I refused to cut the main stem. Today, I had to as the disease approached the last new stem and I fear that I have even left that too late. Next to it a new Quince is recovering from its own problems. Finally, its leaves have turned a deep green after two years pale and sickly and infected. It has taken a lot of work to turn it around.

But the real patient in the orchard is a gnarled old tree so riddled with festering crevices that when we examined it, we condemned it on the spot. But then at the end of a wonderful day learning to prune with the East of England Apples and Orchards Project we were shown their own pet project, a tree with barely a quarter of a stem left intact, which they planned to renovate over many years. So, our own basket case got a reprieve. Over the last two years it has been reduced to force one tiny branch to grow into a main stem. Now that stem is a bough and thick with enough child-branches of its own to sustain it when we, finally, sever the main boughs. Curiously, like the old lady, it has responded with a thick load of the mankiest, bitter-pitted apples you ever saw. 

And the almost totally dormant Blenheim Orange? We found a pair of perfectly ripe apples on a high branch as we harvested the plums and ate them in the sun surrounded by our sickly, sleepy patients.