Orchard that's the apple of our eye: Amid so much doom and gloom, escape into this enchanting story of two friends who stumbled on a neglected paradise - a true English Eden

The sun had yet to rise as I parked my car beside a disused farm gate which was held shut by twine and bore a sign declaring ‘no public right of way’.

From the darkness of a nearby hedgerow, I heard the mournful sigh of a bullfinch. Next came the chatter of a redstart, a ‘cuck-oo’ and the drumming of a lesser spotted woodpecker, all species in critical decline except, it seemed, in this traditional Herefordshire orchard.

I had heard nothing like this dawn chorus before. It was as if every vanishing birdsong in England was being broadcast at once, like stepping back a century to a scene that Victorian naturalists such as Darwin would have recognised.

A rural orchard in Herefordshire offers a glimpse into Britain's countryside from years gone by

It was still only 6.30am. I opened my old Thermos, perched on a gatepost and watched an amber sun burn the ridgeline of the Malverns, giving me my first glimpse of the Eden where I would soon be spending so much of my time.

Tithe records show that an orchard has been on this site since at least 1840, and among its 700 standing fruit trees are many varieties of apple and pear now lost entirely to the countryside at large but here cherished and protected by the owner, Nancy, and her son David.

From a long line of fruit farmers and cider-makers, they are also perhaps the best wildlife farmers I have ever met.

Since the late 1960s, commercial orchards have prioritised the planting of apple varieties that yield more fruit annually but die after 15 years or so. 

They never attain the crevices or decay needed to make them of use to the insects and birds that thrive in this orchard.

The orchard is home to some of the rarest trees in the English countryside, including a Flakey-Bark, which bears apples that seem irresistible to badgers. File photo

Many of its trees, planted well before the 1940s, are bent into strange shapes. 

Yet the orchard still produces 100 tons of fruit each season and protects an ark of animals now almost impossible to find living side-by-side elsewhere in our dying countryside.

I couldn’t wait to share this unique corner of our island with my friend Nick Gates, a fellow wildlife film-maker I met when we worked together on the BBC series Springwatch.

‘You have to see this place,’ I told him — and most weekends for the past five years we have driven up there from our homes in Bristol, a round trip of some 60 miles, to document a world our grandchildren may never see.

Walking through the orchard in autumn, the ground carpeted with windfalls of every shape and flavour, it seems staggering to us that 80 per cent of the apples we eat in Britain are imported.

We were once world leaders in the craft and production of such fruits. Any orchard grower will explain that the gradual weathering of sun and rain gives our home-grown apples the best taste in the world. Yet in a country where new restaurants and food fashions take off every week, few people seem to be aware of this, or to care.

Boasting trees that date back to the 1940s, the rural orchard is home to wildlife, including great tits, that are almost impossible to see alongside each other in Britain's dying countryside

This madness has been fuelled by supermarkets with no interest in the rich heritage, taste and brilliance of the English apple. Instead, they demand wholly green apples, or those with a certain percentage of red.

The demise of orchards has also been hastened by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which has paid many farmers to clear them in favour of fast-profit crops.

These combined forces favour waxed imports that kill our climate, our wildlife and rural jobs.

Globally, the damage wrought by our reliance on overseas apples is enormous. A single flight from New Zealand, one of our major suppliers, will pump more than three tons of carbon into our planet’s choking lungs. Meanwhile, more and more traditional orchards, their trees reducing carbon levels for free, perish every year.

Boasting an unrivalled dawn chorus, the orchard is home to an array of birds, including woodpeckers redstarts, and cuckoos

En route to Herefordshire, Nick and I drive by the empty, chemical fields and flailed hedgerows.

These farmlands are eerily silent but we know that whenever we arrive in Eden, nature will turn up the volume, especially in spring when the nectar provided by early-blossoming trees is a lifeline for bumble bees.

Finding ourselves below a goat willow one calm, bright April morning, we gawked in amazement. The noise generated by so many bumble bees had to be heard to be believed: a whole tree engulfed by the whirring hum from a thousand tiny wings.

A century ago, this would have been the norm. But the ‘bee-loud’ countryside described by Yeats is now largely an anachronism, except in traditional orchards. 

While pesticides are driving bumble bees out of the surrounding fruit farms, no chemical has touched this land since 1930.

Apple and pear flowers are pollinated almost exclusively by bumble bees and, were they to vanish from the orchard, its entire ecosystem and revenues from cider would disappear. So, too, would the exuberance of its wildlife.

Here, as many as 40 bird species have been recorded within the spacious grasp of our favourite apple tree — a 70-year-old Kingston Black. Goldfinches, mistle thrushes and redstarts are among them but surely the most cunning are the jackdaws, gloss-capped thieves in edgy grey suits.

A small flock of Soay sheep in the neighbouring fields help the jackdaws’ spring-cleaning. 

The birds will hop on the back of a ruminating ewe, gain a firm purchase on the animal’s rump fleece and carefully pull out fresh clumps of wool with which to reline their nests. 

The sheep are unfazed by this welcome thinning of their heavy winter coats.

Herefordshire may be home to modern farmland, defined by chemical fields and flailed hedgerows, but there is a little slice of the past in this orchard, which also boasts fieldfare birds

Jackdaws often occupy the cavities drilled by woodpeckers, as do many other creatures. 

Grey squirrels and hornets, tawny owls and hazel dormice, and even stoats and common toads line up to take advantage of the nesting and roosting sites created by the orchard’s cabinet-makers.

For some birds, such as coal tits, the natural place to raise a family is among the tangled roots at the base of the oldest fruit trees. 

One spring we saw that the entrance to one of these nests was blocked by a small, golden-brown head poking out, the limp, oversized ears and drooping whiskers emphasising that this unfortunate wood mouse was extremely dead.

Only one scenario could explain this. 

A coal tit lays, on average, nine or ten eggs and, having scared off the parents, this greedy mouse had scoffed the lot, equivalent to eating half its own weight. 

We were reminded of the fate of Winnie-the-Pooh when he got wedged in the entrance to Rabbit’s underground home, having eaten his host’s supply of honey.

After a few days’ forced fasting, he was freed. But for our wood mouse there was no happy ending.

Besides providing homes for its residents, the orchard offers them a plentiful supply of food, not least for the bullfinches — scarlet-breasted songsters that were once condemned by Henry VIII for their ‘criminal attacks’ on fruit trees. 

The oldest fruiting tree visited by the conservationists was 150 years old, but still produces Barland pears

Their secateur-like bills can make short work of up to 30 flower buds a minute, and an Act of Parliament passed during Henry’s reign decreed that one penny would be paid for every bullfinch trapped and killed.

As this suggests, Henry had a sweet tooth, as did his second wife Anne Boleyn. 

While she was particularly fond of cherries, he loved apples and pears and ordered his fruiterer Richard Harris to scour the Western world for its best fruit varieties and cultivate them in England. 

Those Harris brought back included the ‘pippin’. The word sounds English but, we were a little sad to discover, this apple is originally from France, its name being French for seedling.

By 1877, there were 89,000 acres of orchards across England and in the following year a book was published called the Herefordshire Pomona, an illustrated record of the 432 varieties of apple and pear that had been cultivated within that county alone.

The drawings of apples still leap from the page more than a century later. From the Sheep’s Snout to the Tom Putt, the Eggleton Styre to the Hagloe Crab, the Cider Lady’s Finger to the Bloody Turk, the rich culinary heritage of our orchards shines in reds, greens and yellows from every illustration.

The oldest fruiting tree in the orchard we visit was planted eight years before the Herefordshire Pomona was published. Now 150 years old and fissured by time, it looks deader than most dead trees — yet each year, perfect Barland pears hang from its branches.

Nearby are two of the rarest trees in the English countryside. 

A Flakey-Bark, bearing apples that seem irresistible to badgers, is a craggy giant seen in only a few locations. 

And in one corner stands the Betty Prosser pear, one of only 13 such trees known to exist in the UK.

Unlike apples, pears must be collected within two days of hitting the ground. 

Come autumn, David takes the windfalls to the orchard’s old cider mill, where a huge stone wheel crushes them and extracts every last drop of the amber fuel destined to become perry.

Once this wheel was powered by a donkey but now it is turned by an old motorbike, last used for transport in 1961 before being put into permanent harness by David’s father.

To make perry requires only a single variety of pear, with just one veteran tree providing a sufficient range of fruits to supply acidity, sweetness and drier, tannic qualities. Apples are a different matter.

Most ciders are made from a blend of apples and many trees can conspire to give David the balance he needs. 

A Frederick, for example, will yield fruity, high-quality cider but can’t be stored for too long, while the Dymock Red will inject a bitter-sharp taste.

Regarding when they should be harvested, an old Herefordshire saying is that you must ‘leave them to sweat’. 

If a bruise can be seen after gentle thumb pressure is applied, the apple can be picked from the ground — if the orchard’s non-human residents haven’t got to it first.

Conservationists say listening to the birds sing in the orchard is like stepping back to the time of Charles Darwin

In recent years, red admiral butterflies, which once migrated south into mainland Europe, are increasingly surviving our ever-milder winters — and as the fermenting sugars in the fallen apples are converted into alcohol by their metabolisms, they become drunk and disorderly.

On occasion, the red admirals must be picked up and walked home. 

One butterfly we helped took quite some time to recover when placed gently on a bough, and on take-off its flight was still noticeably erratic.

When November brings the first frosts, the log fire is lit in the old farmhouse and Nancy and David map out the planting of rootstocks in the months ahead.

Onto these, David will graft budding branches from his most special varieties. 

It is a process he undertakes zealously, but it can take place only in spring when the orchard’s trees begin to wake up.

When that time comes, tape is wrapped around the point where scion meets root and slowly, under pressure from the carefully administered bandage, the two will join.

Cells fuse into cells and five centuries of cultivation find new roots in the ground of our adopted orchard — that fading paradise which must live on. 

Orchard, by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates, is published by William Collins, £20.

To order a copy for £17.60, go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193. Free UK delivery on orders over £15. Offer price valid until 17/10/2020.