A talk by Malcolm Thick on 7 Feb 2024
Fruit-trees grown in hedgerows and fields
I was taken to the community orchard in the recreation ground- and most impressive it was- a good collection of fruits, many of which are not sold commercially. But all these must have had some value at one time, being bred for specific characteristics –late or early fruiting, a pleasing shaped fruit, or some such characteristic , taste etc. And they have such beautiful names – the Napoleon Bigarreu cherry, or Tydeman’s Early Worcester apple, a delicious early dessert apple.
An early fruiter, it reminds us that, in former times, it was possible to purchase trees which would fruit in all months of the year.
It is sobering to consider that we probably have fewer varieties of fruit available from commercial nurseries today than 250 years ago. Even a small nursery deep in Dorset, in 1782 had a wide selection of fruit trees.
My talk tonight is not however, concerned with such rarities. It concerns hedgerows. Hedgerows have been much in the news recently- only last week the CPRE in Oxfordshire relaunched its ‘Hedgerow Heroes’ campaign. The emphasis today is on preserving hedges as havens for wildlife. In the past the talk was all of how to use hedges productively. So, I will briefly describe the longstanding practice of some farmers planting fruit trees in hedgerows, or singularly in fields. The earliest writer to note of this was John Gerard in his monumental herbal of 1599. 
He reported that
‘…..I have seene in the pastures and hedge-rowes about the growndes of a Worshipfull gentleman, dwelling 2 miles from Hereford , called M. Roger Bodnome, so many trees of all sortes, that the servants for the most part drinke no other drinke, but that which is made from apples.’
Planting fruit-trees in fields and hedgerows was obviously unusual, which is why Gerard noted it. A few years after Gerard, Arthur Standish, a courtier, spent some years investigating the reasons for widespread rural discontent in 1607 and produced a report published as The Commons Complaint, in 1612.
He suggested various measures to help the economy, one of which was to increase agricultural productivity by
‘… the profit of planting Fruit-trees in Hedges or Orchards, as of apples, wardens, peares, walnut and chestnut trees’.
He complained that fruit was presently imported from
‘forraine Countries at a dear rate’ [whereas] the very soile of our hedges is such, as they would yield great plenty, without hindering any other profit, and may be gained with lesse cost and labour, then any other commoditie in this Kingdom whatsoever..’.
Standish [and others] said hedges as they stood were unproductive. They were homes to vermin and weeds but their soil was never used to produce crops and so was potentially richer than soil in fields.. Fruit-trees would enable hedges to become productive.
Standish (quite fairly) listed both the advantages and disadvantages of fruit trees in hedgerows:
Advantages
- the trees gave shelter from hot sun and strong winds, resulting in higher yields of both crops and cattle;
- a crop of fruit could be sold, consumed on the farm or made into cider or perry;
- and, in course of time, the trees would yield fruit-wood of value to woodworkers.
- Moreover, blossoming fruit trees sweetened and purified the air.
Disadvantages
- fruit would be stolen by the poor;
- overmuch planting would depress the price of barley [less beer drunk];
- the trees would cause too much shade, retarding crops and making the soil too wet;
- finally, farmers were stubborn and would object if compelled to plant fruit trees in hedge-rows.
Other objections voiced later were
- that trees sometimes dripped onto the crops, lowering yields.
- that tree-roots spread into fields, draining water and nutrients from the soil and making ploughing difficult.
- often hedgerow trees impoverished the hedge immediately surrounding them, leaving gaps in hedges on either side of the tree.
Standish, and later writers – attempted to quantify the economic argument for planting fruit trees in hedges and fields.
In terms of output-
Standish imagined apple or pear trees planted in hedgerows with the fruit thereof used for cider or baked as human food. He assumed 4 trees per acre, and a value of 6 pence per bushel, giving total annual extra income of £1,200,000 . This implied a yield of 48,000,000 bushels. At 4 trees per acre, Standish’s hedges would have enclosed 12,000,000 acres.[1]
Another way of looking at the economic advantage, Standish wrote, was
- -one bushel of apples makes 2 gallons of cider at first pressing and one gallon at a second.
- One bushel of pears makes 2.5 gallons of perry.
Using the estimate of bushels above, we can estimate the increase in cider production. [which I will leave you to do]
Later writers claimed that extra income from fruit-trees in hedges could be substantial. One in 1804 claimed that if a ‘judicious mixture of cyder fruit trees were planted in hedges the profit arising from them would abundantly repay the cost of the whole hedge’.
Various writers throughout the 17th century were keen to promote the casual planting of fruit trees-
John Beale, the clergyman who contributed to John Evelyn’s Sylva and produced a pamphlet ‘Herefordshire Orchards, a Pattern for all England, written in an Epistolary Address to Samuel Hartlib, Esq. By I. B. in 1656 . He highlighted the long-standing practice of sowing fruit trees in his home county and adjoining ones [Worcestershire & Gloucestrershire]
Samuel Hartlib, a writer on science in the 1650s, recorded that the fourth Earl of Southampton
‘neare Porch-mouth is planting 15. thousand fruit-trees and hath a special designe for making of Cidar.’ [2]
He also recorded a Barrister of the Inner Temple. Richard Collins, who had a nursery of 15,000 fruit trees in Kent. recorded
‘The 3. of September Mr Richard Collins came the first time to my house a Barrister of the Inner Temple in Cawfield-Court a great and most experienced Lover and Practiser of the Art of Planting. His lands are in Kent, where hee has raised a Nursery of 15 thousand Fruit-trees’. It is significant that John Evelyn Dedicated his 1670 edition of Pomona, a work on fruit trees to Lord Southampton. And he Lord Scudamore ‘by the noble example of my Lord Scudamore and of some other publick spirited gentlemen in those parts, all Herefordshire is become, in a manner, but one Orchard.’
A writer on agriculture and gardening at the the end of the seventeenth century Leonard Meager, in 1697, made extravagant, if vague, claims for increased yields from planted casually fruit trees.
‘If you set rows of Trees, either Fruit or others, in the middle of your fields, at such a distance as not to hinder the Sun from bringing forth the Grass, or ripening the Corn it will yet turn to a greater advantage, as four, or six fold, and make the husband-man, in a little time, rejoyce in his labour, and so much Land now of little worth may be very much improved’.
As supporting evidence, he cites,
‘Land already improved in this nature, in Hertford-shire, Worcester-shire, Gloucester-shire, and other Countries; redownding to the great benefit of the Owners, who have, by this means, a double Crop yearly, one of Fruit, and the other of Corn, and a third may, in some cases, be brought to perfection; viz. of Turneps, or such like, that may be sown, ripe, and drawed, before the season for sowing Barley comes on; by which means Land may be improved to a great value, or if laid down for Meadow, or Grazing, nothing can be more accommodating to cattle, than a Pasture fringed with substantial Trees, spreading their Branches, as I have hinted, to screen , by sheltering from Rain, Winds, Heat, or Cold.[3]
There were frequent mentions of Herefordshire, Worcestershire , and Gloucester as the 3 English counties where casual fruit tree-planting had long been carried out is made from the 16th century onwards.
These ways of planting fruit-trees in print may seem to be an ideal to be striven for rather than a practical proposition but there is evidence of actual practice and its results. William Ellis, writing in the 1740s and 50s, records hedgerow and field planting of fruit-trees he actually carried out. As well as apple and pear trees he has hundreds of cherry trees on his farm in Hertfordshire many planted on grass baulks at the edges of his ploughed lands ‘in single rows’. Some trees in fields were dunged by animals which rested under them. One of his favourite cherry trees, which grew in his home close, an arable field,
‘was one of the largest trees in these parts; and tho’a wild cherry, I have sold the fruit for a Guinea upon the tree, clear of all charges.’ In 1750 he claims of his Black Keroon Cherry trees, ‘I believe I have above fifty of these sort of improved cherry-trees in my plow and meadow fields’.
A survey of a Herefordshire farm in about 1700 where the surveyor has identified all the standard trees growing in the hedgerows, including 59 apple trees and 165 cherry trees.
I could go on quoting calls for farmers to plant fruit trees in hedgerows from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but the same arguments as before are used and there is nothing really new going on, For instance, in the Journal of Forestry and EstateManagement for October 1885 we read:
By a judicious selection of hardy, vigorous growing and free-bearing sorts, there is scarcely an arable farm in the country, that it would not pay the owner or occupier handsomely to plant the boundaries of the fields with fruit trees.
I was tempted to end my paper there
BUT
I was awakened (literally) to a new trend in English agriculture by a Farming Today programme on BBC Radio 4 on the 6 September 2023 at 5.45 am. It began with a voice declaring:
‘The trees can deliver both services to the farm, whether that is shade, shelter, helping with water management or soil health, or they can be a product in their own right in terms of fruit, nuts, and timber.’[4]
This was the opening statement of an interview in a report On Britain’s first ever Agroforestry show, a two-day event exploring the relationship between farming, trees, and hedges, held at Eastbrook Farm in Wiltshire in September 2003. There is now an Agroforestry website backed, by the Agroforestry Research Trust. The Woodland Trust has also taken an interest.
Moreover, the government is now encouraging fruit tree planting and some of the reasoning put forward By DEFRA would have been familiar to the seventeenth-century enthusiast:
Boundary trees can benefit your business. They can:
- provide food and shelter for livestock and crops, boosting their health and yield
- supply wood for timber and fuel
- provide a source of fruit and other ingredients for food and drink
- absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their wood
- contribute to the character and appearance of many of our most valued landscapes.[5]
Here are further pictures from DEFRA
So, Sustainable Harwell is ‘on message’ by planting a community orchard with diverse types of fruit and nut trees. It would be even more in line with current thinking if sheep were allowed to graze within it or we planted a crop of turnips!
Malcolm F. Thick, F.R.Hist.S.
[1]Standish, p.35.
[2] Hartlib Papers, 28/2/60B, 28/2/48B, ‘Porch-mouth is Portsmouth.
[3]Meager, pp. 134-7.
[4] BBC Radio4, Farming Today,6/9/23, 05.45 am
[5] https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/sustainable-farming-incentive-pilot-guidance-establish-trees-along-field-boundaries/ Accessed 21/10/23.
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