Community orchards in public landscape schemes

Apple Day falls on 21 October and was started in 1990 by Common Ground, a charity based in Dorset, as a celebration of variety and a warning about how much of it was disappearing. Common Ground used the apple as a symbol of the physical, cultural and genetic diversity disappearing from the countryside at the same time, in the landscape and the wildlife as much as in the fruit. Sixty or so events were held in 1991, three hundred by 1997, and more than six hundred by the end of the decade.

Traditional orchards in England and Wales have declined by around 81% since the early 1900s, a loss of area almost the size of the West Midlands, and roughly 90% has gone since the 1950s alone, to neglect, to development and to conversion into intensive modern production. The traditional orchard is now a UK Biodiversity Action Plan Priority Habitat, which is a formal way of saying there is not much of it left.

Of the orchards surveyed in England by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, 45% were found to be in declining condition, and the reason given most often is simply that nobody has replaced the trees as they died. An orchard is a population rather than a monument, and one that stops recruiting new trees has a fixed and fairly short future.

Orchard planting has started to reappear in public open space on housing and regeneration schemes, partly for the blossom and the character it gives a place, and partly because the habitat argument has become a measurable one. Both of those are good reasons. The planting that results is usually a rather different thing from a working orchard, and being clear about that difference from the outset is what makes it succeed.

Why an old fruit tree is such good habitat

Apple, plum and cherry all begin to hollow and lose heartwood at a relatively young age compared with an oak, which means an orchard produces the deadwood conditions of a veteran tree within decades rather than centuries, while the tree carries on living and cropping around the damage. The value of a traditional orchard comes mostly from that decay rather than from the fruit.

The noble chafer, Gnorimus nobilis, is one of the rarest beetles in Britain, a metallic bronze-green insect around two centimetres long whose larvae develop entirely inside the rotting wood of standing apple, plum and cherry trees. Beetles, flies, spiders and bracket fungi occupy the same material, and none of them can use a young, sound tree, which is what makes decaying wood inside a living trunk so scarce a habitat.

The bark and exposed wood of old orchard trees carry mosses and lichens, and often mistletoe, which brings its own specialists with it, among them the predatory bug Anthocoris visci and the weevil Ixapion variegatum. Add the blossom in spring, the windfall fruit in autumn, and the unimproved grassland that usually sits under a traditionally managed orchard, and the habitat stacks up in a way that very few planted landscapes manage.

A newly planted orchard delivers blossom, fruit for birds and a pleasant place to sit from the first few years, and delivers the deadwood habitat only if the trees are still standing in thirty or forty years and nobody has tidied away the dying limbs in the meantime. Almost none of the habitat described above arrives with the trees, which makes long-term management, rather than the planting itself, the thing that decides whether the habitat case is real.

Where orchard planting sits in biodiversity net gain

Traditional orchard is treated as a high distinctiveness habitat in the statutory biodiversity metric, which puts it well above amenity grassland or ornamental planting in the units it can generate. Biodiversity units are a product of area, condition, distinctiveness, strategic significance and connectivity, so distinctiveness alone does not carry a scheme, but it sets the ceiling.

Creating a high distinctiveness habitat calls for specific planting stock, a longer establishment period and more intensive management than a conventional landscape area, and it carries a higher risk of failure, all of which the calculation and the associated risk multipliers account for. Orchard creation is not a shortcut to units.

What it can be is a genuinely good fit where a scheme has open space that needs to be more than mown grass, particularly on sites where the planting has to serve residents and habitat at the same time. The commitment being made is a long one, and it should be entered into on those terms rather than as a line on a drawing.

Planting for blossom and wildlife rather than for a crop

An orchard in public open space is rarely planted to produce fruit for people, and treating it as though it were tends to create problems. Dessert and culinary varieties need annual pruning, thinning and pest management to crop properly, they drop heavy fruit onto paths and play areas, and the harvest belongs to nobody in particular. Ornamental and native fruiting trees give the same blossom, the same seasonal rhythm and considerably more value to wildlife, with a maintenance regime a grounds team can actually deliver.

Crab apples in particular hold their small fruit long after leaf fall, through the frosts that soften it, which is exactly when blackbirds, thrushes and winter migrants need it and long after the windfalls from a culinary apple have rotted into the grass. Fruit that stays on the tree is the quality to look for.

The trees below cover a wide range of size and character, from a thorny four-metre shrub to species making fifteen metres, and the fruit runs from deep red through orange to clear yellow and on to the near-black cherries of the bird cherry. Those differences decide more than the appearance of the planting, because each tree has to fit the space it is given for the whole of its life.