As English apple season arrives, Ysella Sims writes on the arts of picking, harmonious growing, and eating.
You might not think so, but there’s an art to picking an apple. Half a century ago my Grandmother taught it to me; first you must gently lift the weight of the fruit in your hand, then turn and twist it upwards without pulling, testing for any give and listening closely for the ‘tick’ that tells you it is ready to come away.
Between early September rain showers, in my garden in the village of Sandford on the outskirts of Crediton in Devon, I pick the apples I can reach from my favourite tree. Behind me I can hear the soft thud of others falling to the ground, impatient for their turn; apples with names like Keswick, Russet, Fiesta and Court de Wycke.
The apple I am picking, a traditional English eating apple called ‘Lord Lambourne’, is derived from an orange pippin. It has matt, lime green skin, blushed with orange and antique red. It’s pleasingly acidic and tastes of strawberries and summer. This is a high point of the year, a time when I can choose from a variety of home grown English apples with personality and bite in place of the same imported, anodyne apples from the supermarket.
In Sabine Baring-Gould’s A Book of the West, published in 1899, he describes Crediton as, ‘a great centre of apple culture and cider-making.’ He devotes thirteen pages to descriptions of the apples, ninety percent of which are now thought lost, found in Crediton’s twenty-six thousand acres of apple orchards. ‘The autumn sun is shining,’ he says, ‘there is a crispness in the air, the leaves are turned crimson and yellow, of the same hues as the fruit. The grass of the orchard is bright with crimson and gold as though it were studded with jewels’. Records from 1808 reflect the number of orchards even in the centre of town, including one description of a ‘good orchard, well stocked with apple trees of prime cyder fruits (from which there have been made in some years thirty hogsheads of cyder or upwards’).
But as the urban stretch has gobbled up land, nearby Sandford is still home to a good number of apple trees and orchards. Each year as September ambles towards October, the air here begins to smell drunk with fermenting apples. Doorways fill with bags and boxes of apples with signs reading, half-pleadingly, ‘Please help yourself’. Wassailing is still an annual event. In January villagers process by flaming torchlight to sing songs to apple trees in Sandford’s community orchard, tying toast to branches and pouring cider on roots in hopes of a good harvest. Men appear out of the gloom carrying shotguns, taking aim at the sky to banish lingering evil spirits. It’s gloriously silly, and pagan.
In another orchard, small and wonkily shaped, nestled between Sandford’s parish church of St Swithuns and a hotpotch of thatched and slate roofs, gardener and traditional hedge-layer Steven McCulloch has been working on an idea for testing a method of orchard management using a pollinator-friendly meadow system. Commercial orchards often rely on spraying and frequent mowing, but with a knock on effect on the insects and invertebrates both they — and we — depend on for pollination. Against a backdrop of declining numbers, Steven’s idea is one that could help to buck the trend locally. As a child of the 1970s I might be one of a last generation to have chased clouds of butterflies in swathes of long grass in summer, of turning nettle leaves over to find clusters of duster yellow eggs, of watching the miracle of transformation, from egg to butterfly, in a jar with an air-punched lid.
Steven lets his curiosity and care for the natural world shape the way that he manages landscapes. “I try to base all my decisions on what works primarily for what lives there — if it works for people, then that’s an added bonus”, he tells me. He’s testing a way of managing an orchard that encourages pollinators to stay through the seasons. ‘If you treat it as a traditional hay meadow you’ll have apple blossom through the spring and meadow flowers through the summer, meaning that they’re more likely to build nests and reproduce locally’.
A healthy grassland can support many types of insects and invertebrates — for example, moth and butterfly caterpillars rely on tall grasses as a food source before pupating. Most pollinating insects — apart from honey bees — have an annual lifecycle and depend on this habitat to feed and reproduce. But when grass in an orchard is regularly mown, there’s nothing for them to eat and nowhere for them to go.
He’s introducing yellow rattle, an annual wildflower that feeds off the nutrients in grass roots, helping to limit its spread and allow other plants like meadow flowers to flourish beneath the trees. ‘A certain amount of grass is needed to cushion the fruit when it falls,’ he says, ‘but managing it with a cutting regime that removes the grass at key times means that it isn’t causing problems and you’re providing flower rich, nectar rich sources for bees once the flowers have gone over.’
The test area is just over an acre of awkward-to-reach orchard, one that could define the term organic. The trees are a mix of old and new and grow wherever they please. When I visit on a July day the grass is clicking with crickets and grasshoppers and swaying gold. Previously sheep might have been brought in to keep the grass down, but their voracious appetites can prove a problem for biodiversity. I begin to understand the challenges for growers and why modern practice means that trees are grown in uniform rows in easy to manage spaces.
Back in my own little scrap of orchard I sit in the sun to eat an apple. I can see orange Fox and Cubs still flowering in the long grass, their stems and translucent seed heads bleached almost white now from the sun. A meadow brown skips over the last flush of clover. I love this time of year, the way the light changes, the way the air begins to cool. My apple tastes complex; sharp and sweet, nutty and fresh. There are little black marks on its skin so I’m careful to check each mouthful for maggots the way I learned to as a child. It’s a level of unpredictability often foreign to our anxious, pressured age, but one which makes the experience richer and more vivid — I’m happy to take a little jeapordy in return for more flavour.
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Ysella Sims is a writer, poet and performer whose work explores identity, belonging and our connection to place. Based in the rural South West, she writes from the edges, seeking connection in the in-between. Read more at ysella.substack.com.