Historic orchards give us not only a sense of how people farmed and worked and lived in the past; they also represent a record of historical tastes. Many of the diverse fruit varieties in historic orchards have largely disappeared. As the modern farm-to-supermarket system was standardized, growers focused on varieties that were easier to cultivate and sturdier to ship.
In California and elsewhere, rising land prices also led to the sale of orchards to developers. This orchard commemorates what the Santa Clara Valley was before the tech industry took over and christened it Silicon Valley. Housing developments replaced a lot of the orchards in the area, and then the tech boom happened. This is about preserving fruit varieties that put Santa Clara Valley on the map. Hamilton says that in the past, some in the city have suggested the best use of the park and orchard would be bulldozing it and putting in a parking lot.
Packs of squirrels treat them like a fruit buffet. And even though posted city signs prohibit removing fruit from the orchard without permission, there is still a good deal of theft. Last year, when volunteers showed up to harvest the cherry trees and donate the fruit to a local food bank, they found that the entire crop had been picked clean, stolen. An older man busies himself behind the market.
I start chatting with him, and he tells me that this is indeed the last working orchard in San Jose. An old trailer likely used for hauling fruit or orchard material is one of the few pieces of early equipment still in the orchard at Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen, California.
I raise my eyebrow. At about 1, feet above sea level, we get out of the truck and trek into the orchard. The center ran a cannery, and records from show that it sold 15, pounds of apples that year. DNA evidence strongly supports the theory that of the almost 3, apple varieties that populate British orchards, all are the un-hybridised descendants of the wild sweet apple Malus pumila of the Tian Shan region of Central and Inner Asia, and unrelated to the native European crab apple Malus sylvestris 1.
Perhaps surprisingly, the or so years of Roman occupation left no written evidence or vestige in a place name of such activities. Traditional orchard cultivation began to decline with the fall of the Roman Empire, but the associated skills and knowledge may have survived into the late medieval period within settled monastic communities.
During the 17th century much of our fruit growing expertise centred around aristocratic nurserymen such as Ralph Austen and John Tradescant, and the writer John Evelyn, who were influenced by continental, and particularly French fruit-growing heritage. These wealthy travelling plantsmen collected fruit varieties and established orchards in the estates and large houses of England. Orchards became widely associated with the aristocracy, as illustrated by the number of National Trust properties that incorporate historic orchards.
By , orchards were a dominant landscape feature in many counties. The first written records of cider-making date from the reign of King John By the counties of Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset already had a well-established tradition of orcharding for the production of cider and perry.
These proliferating farm orchards would often have been dual purpose: providing fruit to eat, cook or store for the farm as well as juice and alcohol.
Many of the extant traditional orchards in Britain are the legacy of the small-scale mixed farming that was predominant before the intensification of agriculture after the second world war. As a result, these orchards are often found close to settlements and usually betray the location of former farms, now shrouded in more recent development.
It still occurs at Carhampton in Somerset and in many other parts of the West Country. In contrast to cider orchards, perry pear orchards with standard trees are a rarer but more spectacular component of the landscape of south-west England, with the trees growing larger and older than apple trees. Luckwill and Pollard list different varieties of perry pear from Gloucestershire alone, many being very localised.
The 19th century was a turbulent period for traditional orchards, but by fruit growing was on the increase again to provide for nascent markets such as that for jam supplied by a new rail network. From onwards, the standardised rootstocks developed by the research stations at East Malling, Merton and Long Ashton enabled people to maximise their planting arrangements for productivity, with the vigorous type M25 rootstock the most suitable for grazed traditional orchards.
Since , fewer and fewer traditional orchards have been planted and the national stock of standard fruit trees is now heavily biased towards an older generation of trees that are more than 50 years old. The s saw the beginning of a significant push to try to reduce the national dependence on food imports with the advent of the Common Agricultural Policy. Funding was made available to convert traditional orchards into more productive farmland causing the widespread destruction of older orchards; a pattern which, to some extent, continues today.
Over the last century virtually all fruit grown for the consumer market has been produced in intensive commercial orchards that utilise semi-dwarfing rootstocks, a range of chemical treatments and trees planted closely in rows along herbicide treated strips. Traditional standard orchards are still planted in association with the cider industry, since sheep-grazed orchards are a component of the commercial set-up of a few producers, like Julian Temperley at Burrow Hill, Somerset.
The ecological value of traditional orchards has long been underestimated and they have only recently come to be appreciated as biodiverse islands within a largely intensive agricultural landscape. Thank you. In the early s, the Orchard Road area was considered as belonging to the outskirts of town, as the commercial centre of Singapore then was located by the Singapore River.
During the late s, Dhoby Ghaut was the site of numerous firms offering horse carriages and stables. Istana Park, opened in , occupies an area that was established as Orchard Park in Tan Yeok Nee was a Teochew pioneer and a major gambier merchant whose plantations were mostly located in Johor, Malaya. Penang Road Open Space houses a garden with plants that provide nectar for butterflies or food for their caterpillars. Winsland House II consists of a pair of Edwardian-era semi-detached houses that were built in the s, along with a new office development built in the early s.
Cuppage Terrace consists of a row of 17 Malacca-style terrace houses built in by Boey Lian Chin, who was the managing director of the now defunct Kwong Yik Banking Corporation. Emerald Hill was the site of a former nutmeg orchard which started to take shape as a residential neighbourhood in the early s.
These include its gently curving pathways, Bandstand Hill and six hectares of the original jungle. The gardens were managed by several directors throughout its history, with Henry Nicholas Ridley being one of the most prominent. At the turn of the 20th century, Goodwood Park Hotel was known as the Teutonia Club, a haunt of German expatriates in the community.
In , the building was acquired by three brothers named Morris, Ezekiel and Elias Manasseh and renamed Goodwood Hall. For a decade, it was a popular venue for weddings, balls and recitals, before the trio of brothers transformed it into a hotel.
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