Orchards

History and fun facts

High-stem orchards in the Betuwe

The Betuwe lies between the big rivers in Gelderland, in the Netherlands. Its fertile river clay makes it one of the best-known fruit regions of the country. In the past there were high-stem orchards everywhere: big apple, pear, cherry and plum trees with a trunk of almost two metres. Sheep or cows grazed under the trees, so the land was used twice. In the twentieth century low trees took their place, because they are quicker and cheaper to pick.

• A high-stem tree can live for a century. A modern low-stem tree is often replaced after about fifteen to twenty years.
• In spring many people drive and cycle blossom routes through the Betuwe.
• Old high-stem orchards matter for owls, bats and insects, and many provinces protect them for that reason.

The quincunx pattern

A quincunx is a square with one more point in the middle, like the five on a die. Roman writers on farming already advised planting trees and vines this way. Every tree then gets the same light from all sides and you can see straight avenues in several directions.

• The English physician Thomas Browne wrote a whole book about the quincunx in 1658: The Garden of Cyrus.
• A triangular grid fits about 15% more trees on the same ground than a square grid with the same spacing.

Espaliers and the Potager du Roi

An espalier is pruned flat against a wall or wire. The wall holds the warmth of the sun, so fruit ripens earlier and sweeter, even in a cool climate. At Versailles, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie laid out the Potager du Roi between 1678 and 1683, the kitchen garden of Louis XIV. Hundreds of fruit trees in all kinds of trained shapes still grow against its walls.

• Well-known forms are the fan, the U-shaped palmette, the oblique cordon and the Belgian fence, where leaning trees form diamonds together.
• The Potager du Roi is now a school of landscape architecture and you can visit it.
• Pears and apples are the easiest to train. Peaches and figs were often put against the warmest wall.

Walled kitchen gardens and crinkle-crankle walls

Large country houses in England often had a walled kitchen garden. The walls kept out wind and thieves and served as fruit walls themselves. In the Netherlands and England people also built wavy walls in the eighteenth century: crinkle-crankle walls, in Dutch slangenmuren. The waves keep such a wall standing while it is only one brick thick, and the hollows catch extra sun.

• Some English fruit walls had smoke flues inside. A stove heated the wall so the blossom would not freeze.
• In the middle of a walled garden there was often a pond or tank to fill watering cans.

Monastery orchards

Monasteries had herb gardens, kitchen gardens and orchards inside their walls. On the famous Plan of Saint Gall, a drawing of an ideal monastery from the ninth century, the cemetery is also the orchard: fruit trees stand between the graves. Monks also kept bees, for honey and for wax for candles.

• Many old apple and pear varieties were kept and passed on by monasteries.
• A well in the middle of the monastery garden gave water for the plants and the kitchen.

Olive groves

Olive trees have grown around the Mediterranean for thousands of years. They grow very old, with thick, twisted trunks and silvery green leaves. On steep slopes in Italy, Greece and Spain they were planted on terraces with dry-stone walls: stones without mortar, laid precisely on top of each other.

• The olive tree of Vouves on Crete is estimated to be more than two thousand years old and still bears olives.
• Apulia, the heel of the Italian boot, has tens of millions of olive trees.
• The art of dry stone walling has been on the UNESCO list of intangible heritage since 2018.

Vineyard terraces: the Douro and the Cinque Terre

In the Douro valley in Portugal, winegrowers cut terraces out of the steep schist slopes over centuries. That is where the grapes for port grow. The region was demarcated in 1756 and has been a World Heritage Site since 2001. In the Cinque Terre in Italy, narrow terraces lie above the sea, often with vines trained low on pergolas.

• The dry-stone walls of the Cinque Terre add up to thousands of kilometres.
• On the steepest slopes of the Cinque Terre, small monorail trains carry the grapes down.
• In a cellar dug into the slope, the wine stays cool all year round.

Orangeries

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, orange and lemon trees were a sign of wealth in northern Europe. They stood in tubs, so they could be outside in summer and go inside in winter, into an orangery with big south-facing windows. The Orangery of Versailles was built between 1684 and 1686 and is still full of trees in tubs.

• In the Netherlands the orange tree was extra popular because of the House of Orange.
• The well-known wooden Versailles planters have side panels that open, so you can tend the roots.
• An orangery usually had a solid north wall to keep the warmth inside.

Cherry blossom in Japan

In Japan people have gathered to look at the cherry blossom for more than a thousand years: hanami. Avenues and parks are full of ornamental cherries that flower for only a week or two. The most planted kind, the Somei-yoshino, is propagated by grafting. So all trees of that kind are really clones of each other.

• In 1912 Tokyo gave thousands of cherry trees to Washington, where they still flower every year.
• Weeping cherries, shidarezakura, have branches that hang down like a curtain.
• Every spring the news in Japan follows how the blossom front moves from south to north.

Cider and bees

In Normandy, Brittany and English counties such as Somerset and Herefordshire there are orchards with special cider apples. They are often too sour or too bitter to eat as they are, but they make good cider. Beekeepers put their hives in the orchard, because most apple varieties need pollen from another variety to set fruit.

• In Somerset people sing to the apple trees in January at the wassail, for a good harvest.
• Fallen apples used to be picked up by hand and taken to the press in baskets and sacks.