In The Orchards Of Kent
St Botolph’s Crypt wet shelter 1976
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When I first visited the National Collection of Fruit Trees at Brogdale outside Faversham in Kent to enjoy the spring blossom, I vowed to go back to admire the crop. This year, I fulfilled my ambition in the company of Contributing Photographer Rachel Ferriman and we were blessed with a golden afternoon in the North Kent Fruit Belt.
Nothing prepared me for the seemingly infinite variety of fruit that exists in nature. Walking into an orchard of two-thousand-two-hundred varieties of apple, all in fruit, is a vertiginous prospect that is only compounded by your guide who informs you this is merely a fraction of the over ten thousand varieties in existence.
What can you do? Your heart leaps and your mind boggles at the different colours and sizes of fruit. You recognise russets, laxtons and allingtons. Even if you had all day, you could not taste them all. Despite the cold spring, it has been a good year for apples. You stand wonderstruck at the bounty and resilience of nature. Then you start to get huffy at the pitiful few varieties of mostly-bitter green apples available to buy in shops, always sold unripe for longer shelf life. How is this progress?
Yet this thought evaporates as you are led through a windbreak into another orchard where five hundred varieties of pear are in fruit. By now your vocabulary of superlatives has failed you and you can only wander wide-eyed through this latter day Eden.
That afternoon there was no-one there but me, Rachel and the guide. We were delighted to have the orchards to ourselves. But this is when you realise the world has gone mad if no-one else is interested to witness this annual spectacle that verges on the miraculous. Walking on, as if in a medieval dream poem, you discover an orchard of medlars and another of quinces.
By now, your feet are barely touching the ground and you hatch a plan – as you munch an apple – to return at this same time of year, decide upon your favourite varieties and then plant your own orchard of soft fruit. When you stumble upon such an ambition, you realise that life is short yet we are all still permitted to dream.
Medlars
Quince
Plum
Mike Austen, our guide
Photographs copyright © Rachel Ferriman
The National Collection of Fruit Trees at Brogdale
You may like to read about my first visit
Lovely delicious fruit! Remember scrumping as kids and being chased by the owner! Never told our parents though x
Pic no1. is very fruity (good).
Did an harvest myself in Denham, Suffolk 40 + years ago alongside the Red folk (followers of that bonkers Bagwan), nice, gentle deluded hippies. Good fruit pickers mind.
Wonderful. And in such a lovely neck of the woods. Nearby Faversham is a peach of a town, one of the most beautiful in England.
Coincidentally, I went out this morning ‘gathering’ (as opposed to ‘hunting’), I visited a local orchard where I bought 2lbs each of Grenadier cooking apples and Discovery eating apples, then from a stall at the side of the road in deep country I bought another 2lbs each of a dark red cooking Pippin and another cooker I can’t remember the name of, striped green and scarlet.
Very much sympathise with your view how sad it is most people don’t get to eat such delicious apples, it is a pity.
What a glorious place! After seeing the amazing array of well-tended flourishing fruit trees, my mind whip-lashed to a favorite apple tree right here on our nine acres in Columbia County. This land, alas, was 100% pasture when we bought it as a home site. A local farmer had used this beautiful place with a remarkable view as pasture land for his dairy cattle. And so it was for many, many years. Once we built our home, we noticed how quickly the land was “reclaiming” itself from its rolling-pasture status. Bushes, shrubs, volunteer trees — everything that was not mowed started sprouting to the amazement and surprise of the two City kids who bought the land. Happily, one of those volunteer trees is a wild apple tree, and it is awash in small apples that seem to bring pure delight to a family of deer who live here. They arrive each evening around cocktail time, taking graceful steps from the deep woods onto the lawn…………making their customary way toward the lower edge of the property, always snaking past the apple tree and pausing to enjoy a munch. Beneath the tree is a carpet of fallen apples, and the heavy boughs drape low, literally full of the small pale red fruit. What luck to have an apple tree!
Oh My Word! Even this little bit left me “wowing” over and over. They are all so perfect and so much fruit on each tree! What were those long skinny pears? I have never seen pears like that…
so envious of such bounty available for guided viewing! Unheard of where I live in Central Texas.
Thank you!
Beautiful! Why does fruit never look so tempting on the market shelves? I could spend an hour just looking at these photos. What a glorious bounty! I may never get to Kent to see them for myself, so thank you for sharing them, G.A.