The beguiling vision of an old orchard in blossom or laden with fruit was once a familiar sight in Cornwall’s Tamar Valley, and indeed throughout Britain.
© NTPL / Mark Bolton
An orchard hero
These simple groupings of trees and grass, tended by families for generations, were a continual source of nourishment and beauty, marking the passing seasons and sustaining long-lived local traditions tied to the orchard calendar. Each parish or farm could boast its own small collection of distinct apples, whose names and uses were carefully guarded and handed down over the years.
Sadly, decades of labour shortages, negligence, and the pressures of commercial fruit production took their toll on Tamar Valley orchards, and these living windows on the region’s cultural heritage had all but vanished by the late 1970s. It was around this time that St. Dominick native, Mary Martin, returned to the Tamar Valley to paint, and discovered that the area’s apple and cherry trees, so productive in her youth, had fallen into a picturesque state of dereliction.
Having spent seven years studying art in an urban environment, she was struck anew by the lush, often rampant vegetation enveloping the formerly tidy lines of abandoned market garden plots and deserted orchards. These scenes of nature reclaiming human handiwork fired her artistic imagination but also opened her eyes to the alarming disappearance of apple and cherry varieties unique to the valley.
Together with her partner James Evans, Mary set out to rescue the Tamar apples and their stories, combing the Cornish countryside for forgotten orchards and seeking out those old enough to remember apples shared by their parents and grandparents.
Precious details and scion wood for many varieties were captured by Mary and James in the nick of time; in one case they snatched unburned twigs from a bonfire after new homeowners chopped down a particularly rare tree. Many local residents took their fruit trees for granted, unaware that the apple falling beneath a developer’s bulldozer or slowly fading on the family farm was the only one of its kind.
The couple also came to the sad realization that they were too late for some varieties, dead or dying with no one alive to remember them. They also mourned the loss of genetic diversity that accompanied the orchards’ destruction, recognizing the importance of salvaging what remained of a valuable gene pool, developed over the centuries and resulting in disease-resistant apples that thrived in Cornwall’s damp, mild climate.
The bulldozer was not the first enemy of the Tamar Valley fruit trees, however. Apple and cherry planting in the region suffered a notable decline during and between the World Wars. The landscape celebrated in the late 19th century for its blossom-clad slopes was given over to planting ‘essential’ crops such as cereals, rather than the tapestries of daffodils, strawberries, and other produce that typically carpeted the orchard floor. Many workers never returned from the wars, and yields from the neglected apple and cherry trees decreased dramatically.
The market gardening industry in the Tamar Valley experienced an intense resurgence in the 1950s, but two decades later the high cost of labour drove the descendants of fruit growers and market gardeners away from their family plots to careers elsewhere.
© National Trust
Cider: a golden inspiration
In the autumn of 1980, James and Mary revisited this agricultural legacy when they discovered an old cider-press at the Callington farm of Westcott and decided to make cider the traditional way, using traditional Tamar cider apples. The difficulty they experienced in their search for old apples and the treasures found in hidden and ageing orchards inspired the creation of their apple collection, which later expanded to include local cherries and even a few pears and plums.
Fabled cider apples, such as the ‘Pig’s Snout’ or ‘Pig’s Nose’ provided an appropriate foundation for the collection, as apple growing in England’s West Country had long been dedicated to cider.
For centuries, cider was the beverage of choice on farms and on sailing ships leaving Plymouth, keeping longer than water during transatlantic voyages and safe to drink without fear of disease. Cider-making was a much-anticipated social event, overshadowed perhaps only by the ensuing celebrations once it was ready for consumption. Mary’s mother, growing up at Cotehele Mill, recalled drawing jugs of golden, gently sparkling cider for Sunday dinners.
In their search for old cider varieties, Mary and James became especially intrigued by an apple said to create a cider so refined and delicate that it resembled champagne. The ‘Colloggett Pippin’ was behind this so-called ‘ladies’ cider,’ but they could find no evidence of the apple on the Colloggett Farm in Landulph. Happily they eventually tracked it down in a wild-looking orchard of the same parish, where they discovered other interesting varieties, among them the shiny ‘Onion Redstreak,’ the long-lost ‘Blackmoor Pippin,’ and the Tamar cider apple ‘Tan Harvey,’ which was undocumented in reference books and not included in the National Apple Collection.
This confirmed the importance of preserving healthy Cornish apples overlooked by the National Fruit Trials collection, as these varieties were most in danger of extinction. The propagation of such apples, free of canker and scab and vigorous in England’s damp South West, will become only more crucial in view of climate change and the desire to reduce the use of chemical sprays. James and Mary have since contributed a number of Cornish apples to the National Apple Collection at Brogdale Horticultural Trust in Kent, including the ‘Colloggett Pippin,’ ‘Tommy Knight,’ and ‘Hocking’s Green,’ a brilliant green apple for cooking and eating that was among the first they saved.
© NTPL / Stephen Robson
An apple by any other name…
Mary and James’ research was complicated by the fact that the same apple would often be called a different name in every parish, or even from farm to farm, where families would refer to a much-loved variety with epithets like ‘Uncle Fred’s sort.’ The ‘St. James’ Pippin,’ a flushed and spicy dessert apple with a strawberry aroma, possesses an incredible 132 synonyms and variations, due largely to its age and distribution: it was first recorded in the 1500s and spread throughout France, Germany and Belgium.
The beautiful deep red ‘Blackrock’ was determined to be another European transplant, ‘Mère de Ménage’, later found in nearby St. Mellion under the name ‘Merrider Menedger.’ Sometimes the same name was applied to several different varieties, as in the case of the ‘Pig’s Nose,’ used to describe a number of concave-shaped Cornish apples.
Apples with colourful old-fashioned names or a unique appearance were also prized. The suitably dubbed ‘Bottle Stopper,’ or the peculiar ‘Cat’s Head’ and ‘Grow-Bi-Nights’ add texture and charm to a walk through the orchard, as does the ‘Sawpit,’ actually found growing beside a sawpit in Landrake in 1983. The impressively large and ribbed ‘Lady’s Fingers’ were also known as ‘Hollow Core’ apples, as they feature a wide eye open to the very core.
In addition to preserving rare regional varieties and curiosities with quaintly descriptive names, careful attention was also paid to propagating those apples with important historical associations. The apple tree is tied more intimately to human history than any other plant, and this was certainly true in the Tamar Valley.
Retrieving the stories behind the apples was in some instances more critical than gathering graftwood, as a family’s way of life, or that of an entire village, could be wrapped up in the particular techniques for harvesting, storing, and preparing a specific apple. Small pickling apples with long stems known as ‘Sweet Larks,’ for example, might help resurrect the nearly lost culinary tradition of pickled apples in Cornwall. And though Mary and James believe they’ve rescued the late cooker ‘Cornish Longstem,’ they fear that the old Cornish recipes featuring this distinctive and exceptionally healthy acid apple have not survived.
Other varieties conjure up tales of their creators, whether commercial nurseries, commemorated by the names ‘Tregonna King’ and ‘Veitch’s Perfection,’ or market gardeners just up the lane, quietly developing fantastic apples for decades. Mr Snell was one such Tamar grower, and the smooth, sunny ‘Snell’s Glass Apple’ pays tribute to his efforts. James Walter Lawry, himself a giant in the valley’s market gardening industry, is appropriately memorialized by ‘Lawry’s Cornish Giant,’ a synonym for the ‘Colloggett Pippin,’ and ‘Lawry’s No. 1,’ a ribbed pale yellow cooker introduced by the celebrated horticulturist in 1872 as ‘Lord Grosvenor,’ but known regionally simply as ‘No. 1.’
A short, sweet history of Tamar fruit
James Walter Lawry launched the explosion of the Tamar Valley’s horticultural industry in 1862, during a visit to Covent Garden Market. Shocked to see that outdoor strawberries were not yet available in London, while at home the crop had nearly finished, he saw that the valley’s warm, sheltered slopes held a tremendous business opportunity.
Thanks to the speed of the newly arrived railway, fruit from the Tamar Valley could reach London, the Midlands, and even Edinburgh within 24 hours. The first Cornish strawberries were sold in Covent Garden in spring 1863, weeks before outdoor-grown fruit was available in the rest of the country, and soon small family operated gardens criss-crossed the landscape. Apple and cherry trees held the soil in place and provided additional crops, and orchards and market gardens flourished together.
The Mother Orchard
The spirit of these energetic growers is very much alive at the venerable Tudor estate of Cotehele, developed over six centuries by the Edgcumbe family and now held by the National Trust. Much of the Tamar Valley fruit industry prospered on land owned by the Edgcumbes, and so it is particularly apt that some of this land has now been dedicated to establishing an orchard of old Cornish apples.
The Mother Orchard, as this eight-acre meadow at Cotehele is known, will be planted with 300 trees representing 120 apple varieties, all propagated from Mary and James’ collection by the Trust’s Plant Conservation Programme. Local cherries have already been planted, and pears and plums will follow in a second phase.
With characteristic vision and passion, Mary Martin and James Evans knew that their remarkable living museum of apples required a permanent, public home. A staggering 95 per cent of orchards have disappeared nationwide since 1950, and along with them rich ecosystems, precious genetic material, and tangible links to our past.
Thankfully projects like the Mother Orchard, and similar efforts throughout Britain, are stemming this loss of cultural and horticultural heritage. Mary and James’ thirty-year dedication to Tamar Valley apples and their stories, combined with the resources and organization of the Plant Conservation Programme at Knightshayes Court, will keep these varieties alive in the eyes, taste buds, and imaginations of generations of future visitors.
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