It’s a cliché, but true nonetheless, that our society has lost contact with the land. In particular, we do not pay much attention to where our food comes from and forget that the natural world is crucial to our survival. Wildlife organisations do all they can to remind us of this fact, and there is an abundance of scientific evidence too, yet somehow it bypasses our consciousness. Witness the media indifference to the recent Restore Nature Now event protest in London.
Perhaps we need a more direct and personal approach. At this year’s Hay Festival there was a warm reception for Robin Wall Kimmerer, US author of Braiding Sweetgrass, who blends knowledge from her career as a plant scientist with the traditions passed down through her Native American ancestry, to the enrichment of both strands of human understanding.
She writes in particular about her own practice of putting people in touch with soil, rivers and plants. This featured too in a session on native wisdom traditions at this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference, where Angharad Wynne from Wales was a speaker. “When you bring people together in a space where the aim is to build community and honour the space, magical things happen,” she said, emphasising also the need to ‘welcome the stranger’. [59-61 mins]
With all this in mind, it was exciting to be part of a new venture on my own patch, a wassailing ceremony at Gogerddan Heritage Orchard near Aberystwyth. How do you start a new tradition? The orchard is just seven years old and its 250 trees are planted scientifically in rows so it’s hardly a repository of ancient lore. Wales might have a fine tradition of orchards with accompanying cultural events, as Carwyn Graves describes in his Apples of Wales, but they have long died out and there are no obvious instructions for how to do our own.
But the will was there, and we worked with what we had. The initial impetus came from Olga, one of the Aberystwyth Conservation Volunteers who have been involved with the orchard from the start. She had been to wassailing events in London so was familiar with the basic plan: tie toast to the trees, read them poems, chuck cider at them, make a noise, and celebrate, all with the general intention of encouraging them to fruit well that year.
Meanwhile Welsh apple enthusiasts had recently decreed that 9 February, the birthday of St Teilo, should be a national day of apple activity. That gave us our date.
Then there was the place. The orchard is in the grounds of Plas Gogerddan, home of the former Welsh Plant Breeding Station led by Sir George Stapledon, whose scientific approach to farming was mixed with visionary idealism; he would probably have approved. Just up the road in the village of Penrhyncoch lives Rhiannon Ifans, author of Sers a Rybana, a study of Welsh-language wassailing songs. Local residents Brenda and Eleri chose verses from the book and set them to suitable tunes, so we had Welsh wassails alongside the English ones. Olga also invited musicians from Twmpath Aberystwyth, who provided an accordionist and a fiddler.
We gathered after dark, some 20 or 30 of us, set up our things on a picnic table and got to it. We chose three trees to honour. The first was Pig Aderyn, a cider variety from St Dogmael’s Abbey, which some of us had helped harvest last year. A sprawling, ungainly tree with masses of red fruit, the stalk sometimes resembling a bird’s beak, there are several specimens in the orchard and the fruit last year went into a single variety cider. We read it an English poem, splashed it with cider and banged saucepans.
On then to Marged Nicholas, a dignified old lady with a strong upright habit. Marged comes from Carmarthenshire and is a cooking, eating and cider variety. Her fruit had made it into a general mix for cider, and she got a Welsh wassail.
I can’t remember what the third variety was – it was dark and hard to find the right tree – but I know which it should have been: Court of Wick. This is a prolific variety from Somerset, very good for eating. With a flavour somewhere between a Cox and a Russet, the apples are small and nutty with a red blush and gold flecks. There are eight of this variety in the orchard and last year we saved the fruit for distribution to local primary schools. We’d even walked a gang of five-year-olds half an hour each way from their school to help with the picking one sunny September afternoon.
Afterwards there was celebration with music, dancing, cider and apple juice, before we tidied up and went home. What surprised me was how easily the event flowed, without any artificiality. It seemed quite natural to express gratitude for last year’s harvest and joy at the thought of next year’s. How miraculous that apples should exist in such abundance and variety, and that there are insects to pollinate them, and sunshine and rain to make them grow.
While we’re at it, how wonderful that publicly funded projects administered in offices should generate whole orchards for our benefit, and that university staff and volunteers should come forward to care for them. What a privilege to be able to collect and distribute their fruit, and how we hope that the next season will be as good.
Plans were immediately made to celebrate Orchard Blossom Day in April, this time in daylight, and with poetry and more dancing, and we did that too (see the amateur video). No doubt there will be more celebrations at harvest time.
These are strange times, as it can feel that the natural world is collapsing around us, and that humanity is bringing about its own destruction. But this is no time to despair. The message I took away from these orchard events is that it’s not hard to make a connection with the trees and the soil, and with each other. We just need to be willing to try.