Audrey Liza – Chapter 8
The Last Orchard
It was nothing like he’d imagined.
He’d pictured a typical apple orchard, like the ones he knew. Smaller than most commercial orchards these days, maybe, and getting ragged and shaggy through neglect. Because the old bloke, Leigh’s Uncle Vernon, would have let things slide in the end, wouldn’t he?
But this.
This was something out of an orchardist’s Baroque nightmare.
Surely she had no hope of getting this under control, not without a team of contractors. She’d been here four weeks and really, as far as he could see, she’d achieved next to nothing.
Not that he’d ever say that, of course.
The trees were collapsing under the weight of their own fruit. The ones that were still bearing at all. They hadn’t been pruned for many years. Probably decades. Water shoots everywhere. Old Vernon must have lost it some time ago.
The house was in a shocking state. Uninhabitable. No services whatsoever to the property. No power, no sewerage, no mains water, no gas, no generator, no heating. No landline, of course, and no terrestrial phone signal. She was living in her campervan, and proposing to move into the draughty bunk barn. There was a tin dunny on a platform out the back. No walls. Just a throne in the open air. Jeez.
And any way you looked at it, the property was a death trap. A tinder box waiting for a lightning strike, a forestry worker’s chainsaw, a dirt bike’s backfire – anything to ignite it. There was one road out – and it was a shitty road, just a dirt track.
Though just ninety minutes from Hobart, this was the arse end of the back of beyond. Other than Leigh’s, there seemed to be a few bush blocks owned by weekenders from Hobart or interstaters who came down a couple of times a year, if at all. Beyond that, it was forestry plantation, then thick bush all the way to Lake Pedder. All the way to the west coast, in fact. It was too far from other properties for the TFS to risk lives on. They’d let it burn – and who could blame them? The property wasn’t defendable in a bushfire.
Why the hell was this place even here? It was too far up the Huon to use the river for freight transport. Was it the vestige of an early experiment in orcharding, maybe in the early nineteenth century when convict labour was cheap and land was free? A clearing left by timber-getters, then put under cultivation by some wide-eyed optimist? The short straw, where some soldier-settler after the Great War fought a heroic last stand? For visions of papery blossoms and plump fruit that had kept him alive in the Flanders mud, or the rocky wastes of Palestine?
Taken up by a young Pommie naval lieutenant in the nineteen sixties. Clearly a man who valued privacy more than financial return. But why? Why any of this?
‘You can tell at a glance that it’s an old orchard,’ he said as they toiled up the slope. Well, he toiled and she strode. ‘Just by the arrangement and shape of the trees. Possibly very old.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah. Modern orchardists grow their trees in a high-intensity hedgerow layout. Means you can fit more trees. Tiny little trees on dwarfing rootstock. Say two-and-a-half thousand of ’em per hectare.’
‘As opposed to …?’
‘Six hundred, six metres apart. Big trees, pruned into a vase shape.’ He laughed. ‘Back when these were pruned at all.’
‘Four times as many trees!’
‘That’s right. Less yield per tree, in a modern orchard, but a lot easier for picking, and irrigation, and weeding.’
‘Of course.’
‘Also, apple trees need to be treated mean to stay productive. Make them think their throat’s been cut, and they get down to making babies. Let them flourish, and they set to building a nice big canopy, and maybe leave off fruiting altogether, every second year.’
‘Ah.’
Did she not know all this, or was she just humouring him? What was it they called blokes who liked to crap on to women, telling them stuff they already knew? Mansplainers. He hoped he wasn’t one. Probably he was.
Still, he couldn’t help himself.
‘The old-style cultivation would be to plough between trees, in a grid pattern. So all this would have been bare earth. Then they finally worked out that was diabolical for soil erosion, so they started to grow grass between the trees. The new style is to slash between the rows, and spray herbicide under the canopy.’
‘Ooh, we don’t like that. Not one bit.’
‘Ha! Don’t be fooled – they used to spray the bejesus out of their apple trees, back then. When you were a little kid running around this orchard – late sixties, early seventies – the gold standard would have been ten cover sprays a year of various products to prevent insect pest and fungal attack. Arsenate of lead and God-knows-what-else. And a good drench of Paraquat or Diquat, or both, to control grass and weeds under the canopy.’
‘I wish you hadn’t told me that.’ She looked sad and he cursed himself for an insensitive clod.
‘Sorry. But you should bear it in mind, depending on what you decide to do with the orchard. Definitely get the soil tested.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I will. I will.’
Of course she will. She’s an environmental scientist. You’re stating the bleeding obvious, mate.
‘On the bright side, though, if your uncle was an unconventional sort of bloke, as it sounds like he might have been …’
‘You could say that.’
‘Then he might have gone for organic methods. Lime sulphur as a winter wash on the trunks, Bordeaux mix before bud burst and after leaf fall. If he learned his stuff back in Somerset, before the War, it’s a fair possibility.
‘Or even a biodynamic approach, following Steiner’s teachings, focus on soil preparations, horn manure and suchlike. Some of it’s woo – just my opinion. Some of it really works.’
‘Is there any way to tell that “at a glance”, too? His cultivation methods?’
‘I wouldn’t say “at a glance” exactly, but if he was an organic or biodynamic orchardist, I’d expect to see bee hives, berry bushes, nitrogen-fixing companion plants like lucerne and clover. Greater insect biodiversity: hoverflies, butterflies, ladybirds, hawkmoths, flower wasps, beetles. You’ll know yourself, a lot better than me: it takes decades for a site to recover from industrial agriculture.’
‘Oh, at least. It also depends on the location, whether there are populations nearby that can recolonise; what’s in the soil seedbank, and so on … Well, there were beehives here, I can state that for a fact. I remember Uncle Vern keeping bees and selling the honey. I’ve come across a few old bee boxes as well, broken down and rotten, and empty.’
‘Shame.’
She looked at him as if he wasn’t quite right in the head. What had he said wrong?
‘The bees have moved out into the bush,’ she explained. ‘Now the damned things are everywhere. Can’t you hear them, buzzing away, up in the canopy?’
They listened for a while. He had noticed the background noise, a constant hum almost like powerlines on a humid day. He’d just put it down to insect life in general: the innocuous sound of healthy bush. He was so used to the sound of honeybees as a reassuring thing, the sound of a productive, fertile landscape.
Suddenly he understood how Leigh might find it alien, sinister, oppressive.
‘The bush around here is thick with feral colonies,’ she went on. ‘Taking up valuable nest hollows that possums and birds need. The bee colonies attract European wasps and hornets, too. They predate the bees for protein to feed their brood – and they love the fermenting fruit in the orchard, of course. Meanwhile there are evening primrose and foxgloves growing out into the bush along firebreaks and paths. Oriental poppies for some reason. I guess Vern just liked them, or someone did before him. And these bloody things …’
She pointed at a thicket of berry canes. They’d probably started off as raspberries, but had hybridised into some gnarly, ferocious Frankenberry with thorns like sharks’ teeth.
‘Plenty of biodiversity, you see, but sadly so much of it’s exotic.’
‘Ah, yeah. They meant well, but didn’t foresee the long-term impacts.’
He looked around.
‘Wonder when this place last burned.’
‘Not for a very long time,’ she stated confidently. ‘Not since I was here as a girl, certainly. So not in the last fifty years.’
They stopped at a monstrous tree, half rotten at its twisted base, with dead branches protruding like antlers. He bent to examine the trunk.
‘This one could easily be over a hundred years old, you know. Are there more like this?’
‘Uh-huh. Several.’
There was very little fruit left under this particular tree. He found a few apples in the long grass: shrivelled orbs that were difficult to identify. One that wasn’t completely inedible or covered in bugs. Turned it in his hand and examined the skin. Broke the desiccated fruit open, sniffed at it. Put a morsel in his mouth and chewed gingerly, before spitting it out.
She watched the performance with interest.
Damn, she was pretty. He could feel another blush coming on. Keep your mind on apples, sunshine.
‘Could have told you more a month ago, but it looks, smells and tastes like a cider apple. Not a dessert apple.’
‘I didn’t know there was a difference.’
‘Oh yes. You can make a decent cider from dessert apples, but for real depth of flavour you want cider varieties. More tannin, less malic acid. Not apples you’d choose to eat, necessarily.’
‘Sounds like you know your cider.’
‘Ah, not really. But we had a go, on the farm. So I read up on it. Thought about taking it further, small-batch commercial production, but decided against it in the end. You could have some really interesting heritage cultivars here, you know. It’d be worth getting them DNA-tested.’
‘Hardly a priority, I’m afraid.’
‘No, I see your point,’ he conceded. ‘This one here could be Brown Snout, though, for instance.’
‘Brown Snout?’
‘Yeah, grew randomly from seed in Herefordshire, in the nineteenth century. Became widely grown in the West Country. Your family’s neck of the woods.’
‘Fascinating.’
He felt absurdly pleased, having proven his credentials as an apple connoisseur.
He was taken to admire the treasures she’d found in the packing shed – a 1960 Dodge Phoenix! What they called ‘barn fresh’ on the pickers’ shows on TV, but it looked as if it could be brought back, with a lot of TLC. There was a little Fergie, around the same vintage as Leigh herself, and – most useful but least impressive optically – a late-nineties Land Rover, a rusty but rugged beast.
Then they braved the ruin of a farmhouse, to rescue a table for her barn. He failed to watch his step and went straight through the wormy old floor – could easily have broken a leg, but luck was on his side.
While he recovered from the ordeal, she made lunch. His hangover had flown, leaving just a slightly fuzzy head and a hint of impetuosity.
‘Look, I’ve been thinking,’ he began. ‘I’d like to go back home.’
‘To New South Wales?’
‘No, no. To see my childhood home, up in the northeast.’
‘I see. How long is it since you’ve been back?’
‘Fifty-five years.’
‘Gosh.’
‘I don’t want to go by myself, though. So I was wondering …’
Don’t make this weird, mate.
‘Would you come with me? We could stay overnight. Maybe two nights. It’s truly beautiful up there. Turquoise water, white sand, granite rocks covered in orange lichen.’
To his surprise, she nodded enthusiastically.
‘That’d be nice. I really could use a break from all this.’
‘How’d you feel about going today, then?’ He hadn’t meant to suggest this. The words had just run away with him. ‘I know it’s very short notice. No notice at all, actually …’
‘I’ll just check my calendar.’
‘Right-o.’
‘Joking. Let’s go! But wait …’
‘What?’
‘Your van or mine?’
‘Oh.’
‘Well, there’s no point in taking both vans, is there? Each of us driving, driving, all alone? Where’d be the fun in that? Let’s see, which is cleaner and tidier …’
‘Yours,’ she decided after a quick inspection. ‘It’s no contest. Sorry, Hilda. I’ve let you down, sweetie. You’ll have to stay behind, guard the place.’
‘Hilda?’
This woman. She was quite eccentric, wasn’t she? This woman he rather liked.
What was he letting himself in for?
Coming up:
This Friday in The Last Orchard: Jamie’s visit from Leigh’s point of view. (Paid subscription.)
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: Jamie and Leigh set out on their road trip back into Jamie’s childhood. There are some surprises along the way.
Author’s Note:
My thanks to Naomie Clark-Port of Frank’s Cider for being the hand (and apple) model for the photo – and a fund of information on apple growing and cider making. Andrew Smith of Willie Smith’s has also been extraordinarily generous with his time and expert knowledge. Likewise Victorian orchardist brothers Jon and Leigh Durham – who were kind enough to show me around Jon’s beautiful Huon pine ex-crayfishing ketch Stormalong. Crayboats and apple orchards: the combination is far less random than I imagined.
You certainly do your research. Well done.