Tag Archives: London Orchard Project

Conservation, Environment, Gardening

London Orchard Project’s 5th Birthday Party, in City Hall

City Hall and the Shard
City Hall and the Shard

In the evening I went down to Tower Hill and walked across Tower Bridge to City Hall, where the London Orchard Project was celebrating its 5th Birthday.

The City and The Tower of London: 1000 years of growth
The City and The Tower of London: 1000 years of growth

The amount of new development is a shock after the relative quiet of west London, but I had a strong feeling (presumably the City Hall architect’s intention) of being right at the centre of a great and bustling city.  Across the river is the quiet symmetry and antique military splendour of the Tower of London: it’s even beautiful in its stern way. But right next to it is the bulging, up-thrusting, grey glass, steel and concrete disharmony of the City, former giants like the NatWest tower and the Gherkin already dwarfed by newer demonstrations of financial might, brazenly shoving their manhood  up into the sky. It’s jarring.

But then, I reflected, there are Roman walls near the Tower and at the Barbican: this city is 2000 years old. It was already ancient when the Normans came and rudely shoved the White Tower with its four-square pinnacles and Might Makes Right foreign invaders’ pennants to fly high over a thoroughly defeated, despondent and disgusted Anglo-Saxon (i.e. English) nation.

Little Red Riding Hood (symbol of Idunn, goddess of Apples and fertility) would have been proud of the baskets of bright red donated fruit
Little Red Riding Hood (symbol of Idunn, goddess of Apples and fertility) would have been proud of the baskets of bright red donated fruit (image not enhanced)

Once inside City Hall, after the brisk initiation with airport-style security (at least I didn’t have to remove shoes and belt), it was down and round the ridiculously long spiral ramp – what a grotesque waste of space compared to stairs and lifts, but how distinctive also (presumably city politics takes you round and round and never seems to get anywhere, hmm), I stumbled into a meeting room decked out with fruity bunting, maps, photographs, fruit juice, cider, apples, apple cake and bowls of dried fruit and nuts.

Some of the Project's Apple Juice to try
Some of the Project’s Apple Juice to try

I learnt that London Orchard Project had been founded by two friends, Carina and Rowena, who had just realized that our parks didn’t have to consist of nothing but inedible London Plane trees and grass. They emailed a lot of people and within four days had 120 groups who wanted to join in! Since then, 12 old overgrown orchards have been saved and restored, and an extraordinary 83 new orchards have been planted all over our city: soon there will be 100. Even after 2000 years of urban growth and development, I reflected, there is still space and energy and enthusiasm and collegiality for a hundred beautiful spaces full of healthy, vigorous,  productive fruit trees.

Carina, Rowena, Lewis and Amber cutting the cake ... with a fiercely serrated pruning saw
Rowena, Kath, Carina, Merrin, Lewis and Amber cutting the cake … with a fiercely serrated pruning saw

All the talks were remarkably interesting. Lewis McNeill gave practical tips for healthy fruit trees, from pruning to fertilising, and gave away root cuttings of Comfrey, a herb which grows vigorously and gathers minerals in its leaves, making it ideal as a mulch for Apple trees. London Glider cider-makers described their first few years, going from newbies to experts: unlike beer, which you make, sell, and then do the next batch, cider is made in the autumn, sold in the spring so you need a lot of storage: they do 7,000 litres a year, the limit before paying excise duty on every litre.

Amber Alferoff, a project manager (she’s on the right of the photo) spoke on the folklore of apples – all those fertility goddesses like Astarte/Ishtar, Aphrodite, Freya, Idunn and the Roman goddess Pomona (that was an easy one) have names that mean Apple, apparently, while Adam and Eve are offered the Apple by the Snake/Dragon, a combination that goes right back to ancient Babylon long before the bible, apparently.

London Orchard Project founders Rowena and Carina cut the birthday cake
London Orchard Project founders Carina and Rowena cut the birthday cake

Carina and Rowena joined the celebrations by cutting the cake with a viciously sharp doubly-serrated 70-cm pruning saw (and the obligatory hard hat for tree work). There are 1200 volunteers; hundreds of Orchard Leaders; 50 public events; 3 tons of apples; a new apple variety, “Core Blimey”; and they even met the Queen. They worked fulltime for the project for a while but have now taken a well-deserved back seat as trustees.

In the driving seat now is Kath Rosen, Chief Executive, who spoke energetically about progress and the future, which most immediately is to start work in other cities including Manchester. That means the project has to be renamed to the Urban Orchard Project, as it’s no longer just London: growth indeed.

And Rich Sylvester, wearing quite a hat, told stories and made us sing an adapted version of ‘I’ve been a Wild Rover / For many a year’ only it was all about orchards.

But for me the most inspiring talk of the evening was given by the community team from the Orchard Estate in West Greenwich. The photographs told the story: a bleak estate of tall ugly brick-and-concrete towers surrounded by blank areas of grey concrete and dustbins. The residents never spoke to each other. Then in 2012 with the Olympics, money was on offer for a dozen projects, just a proposal was needed. They had a go and won: now there’s an outdoor gym area, popular with all ages; a large square of grass dotted with neatly mulched circles around handsome apple trees; and a veggie polytunnel and a dozen allotment plots, where neighbours come out to sit, chat and enjoy working together. The effect on wellbeing and genuine community (what an overused word that is) was immediate. Now the London Orchard Project has got them to act as tree nursery for the whole project, as they have enough land for it, and willing people too.  When they said that now they were extending the orchard with more trees every year in a new area of the estate, there was cheerful and rightly appreciative applause. We learnt, too, that visits to other orchards were always enjoyable, always a time to learn more. The name “Orchard Estate” had come, by the way, from a real orchard that the concrete had destroyed, the architect soullessly naming each hideous tower after a kind of apple – Worcester Pearmain, Egremont Russet and so on. Now, full circle, a tree of each of those varieties has been planted: all but one, now uncommon, which is being sought. Life goes on, and together, if we work as a community, we really can be in harmony with nature and each other.

 

Conservation, Gardening

How to Prune a Fruit Tree

Ice patterns in puddle, Huckerby's Headows
Ice patterns in puddle, Huckerby’s Headows

I arrived at Huckerby’s Meadows in the crisp early morning. No, I hadn’t heard of it either: it was round the back of the industrial estate at Cranford, squeezed in between the edge of London and the perimeter of Heathrow airport. The puddles were interestingly frozen, the looping pattern suggesting successive stages of freezing.

Wheels down: right under the flight path at the end of Heathrow's north runway
Wheels down: right under the flight path at the end of Heathrow’s north runway

The meadows have miraculously survived untouched by the rushing development all around them. In fact, it protected them – nobody wants to live exactly under the end of the flight path, just before the planes drop over the airport fence and shriek to a halt on the runway; and the airport itself may well have had designs on the land, buying it up just in case, but not sure what to do with it. Huckerby’s meadows are now leased by the airport authority to London Wildlife Trust. It discovered a hidden corner of England, taken over by wildlife: I saw muntjac deer prints, jays, a green woodpecker, mallard ducks, a singing song thrush, and fieldfares chattering in the hedges.

A carpet of crab apples - surely there for a reason
A carpet of crab apples – surely there for a reason

The meadows had become seriously overgrown with brambles, creeping across the grass from the hedges. Volunteers have now cleared most of them, revealing a curious sight: the meadows contain a large number of big, old crab apple trees in their midst, nowhere near the hedgerows, so they must have been there for a purpose. A possible clue is in the carpet of fallen crab apples: perhaps old Huckerby found them useful fodder for his pigs? The crab is so sour that it is barely suitable as human food – crab apple jelly about covers it – but pigs will eat them as a change from the swill they were presumably fed on, in those days.

We volunteers had been lucky enough to get a place on a fruit tree pruning course, run jointly by London Wildlife Trust and the London Orchard Project. The course tutor, Bob, had come down from Norfolk to get us up to speed. The pole saws we had to use were remarkable, extending to 12 foot long, with a viciously sharp curved saw at the far end – think of the scythe in the hands of the black-cowled figure of Death, and you have the general idea. Bob effortlessly lopped off an offending branch ten feet above his head. We wore awkward goggles and hard hats; fresh, sharp-edged sawdust falling in your eyes means an instant visit to casualty, and of course as you saw something and look up, that’s just where the stuff is going to fall.

Er, how do I hold this? LWT volunteers trying out pole saws for the very first time
Er, how do I hold this? LWT volunteers trying out pole saws for the very first time

Bob explained remedial pruning; you don’t want ‘a tree on top of a tree’, a new vertical shoot rising from the end of an exposed branch, or the tree will get topheavy and split. You can’t just hack away: the tree will go into emergency overgrowth mode if you cut away more than 20% of the branches in a year. If an individual branch is heavy, just slicing away from the top means it will split when you are halfway through, letting wet and fungi into the wound, so it is best to cut in stages, reducing the weight by cutting smaller branches further out. Then you can cut the main branch part-way through from the bottom, finishing off from the top for a neat job, a cut surface that will shed rainwater cleanly. And you want to shape the tree neatly, with no crossing branches: they should radiate out tidily, giving each other space. Suddenly there was a lot to think about, and we looked at trees with newly informed interest. Then it was time to try it for ourselves. It was a lot harder than watching Bob do it; the poles were tricky to manoeuvre through the tangle of branches, the sun was in our eyes, and sawing at a distance felt nothing like holding a handsaw. But with supervision and encouragement we got the hang of it, and were soon bringing sizeable lumps of wood safely down to earth.

Bob also answered our questions about fruit trees – I needed something to pollinate my Cox’s Orange Pippin apple as it wasn’t bearing much fruit. The pollinator needs to be a suitable variety, so the flowers are open at the same time and the pollen is not rejected as being the same – Coxes do not self-pollinate. Lord Lambourn, for instance, is a good choice, as it is a useful cooking apple to complement the sweet eating Cox, and the two varieties pollinate each other as the bees fly about the garden visiting flowers.

By the end of the day, I had learnt a great deal, realising that I was only just beginning to grasp the rudiments of a fascinating subject. Maybe I’ll try grafting next year.