Bush orchards and what changed

The bush form is a small tree with a short leg — a clear trunk of perhaps half a metre — and a head that is kept within reach and within the row. Trees are planted in rows close enough that the canopies meet along the row and leave an alleyway between rows wide enough for a tractor. Because the trees are smaller, more of them fit; because more of them fit, the orchard intercepts more light per hectare, and light interception is ultimately what sets yield.

Size is controlled by the rootstock rather than by pruning. MM106 and MM111 are the two usually chosen for cider, being semi-vigorous rather than dwarfing: they give a tree that can stand without permanent support, tolerate a grassed alley, and hold up to being grabbed by a trunk shaker. The truly dwarfing stocks used in dessert orchards, M9 in particular, need a support system and usually irrigation, and neither is affordable for a crop sold by the tonne.

The orchard floor is managed rather than grazed: a herbicide strip or mown strip along the tree row, a mown grass alley for machinery. Livestock have no place in it, both because the trees are within reach and because the machinery traffic and the harvesting pattern do not accommodate them.

Bush planting spread through English cider growing from the middle of the twentieth century, driven by the large cider companies contracting fruit from farms rather than growing it themselves. A contract needs a predictable tonnage, and a predictable tonnage needs an orchard that crops early, crops regularly and can be harvested by two people and a machine rather than by a village.

The mechanical harvest requirement changed the cultivar list. A variety that holds its fruit unevenly, or ripens over six weeks, or bears heavily only every second year, is a poor fit for a system built on a single pass with a shaker. Cultivars that crop regularly, ripen together and have a manageable habit did well out of the transition — Michelin and Dabinett being the obvious English examples — and some older varieties effectively left commercial planting altogether.

It also changed what the orchard costs to run. A bush orchard on a commercial programme receives fungicide sprays, nutrition, careful pruning and mowing; it is a farmed crop in a way a standard orchard is not. The higher yield pays for that, and the shorter life means the whole system is designed around eventual replacement rather than around permanence.

Between the two sits the half-standard: a tree on M25 or MM111 with a clear trunk of roughly 1.2 to 1.5 metres, planted at intermediate spacing. It is the form most often chosen by growers who want more yield than a standard but still want to graze sheep, keep the orchard as permanent grassland, or plant something that will outlast a thirty-year commercial cycle.

Half-standards are also the usual choice in orchard restoration and new community planting, because they reach a useful size quickly, are easier to prune from the ground than a full standard, and can be protected from stock with a guard rather than by height alone. They will not deliver bush-orchard tonnage, and they are not a substitute for a veteran standard orchard ecologically, but they are a genuine compromise rather than a fudge.

A bush orchard supports far less wildlife than the orchard it replaced, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of how carefully it is managed. There is no decaying wood, because trees are removed before they decay. There are no hollowing trunks or rot holes, because trees never live long enough to hollow. The sward is mown, fertilised or sprayed off rather than permanent unimproved grassland. Nothing in the system accumulates the features that make an old orchard valuable, because the system is designed to be reset every three decades.

This is a genuine trade rather than a failing. A hectare of bush orchard produces the fruit that several hectares of standard orchard would, which means that on a fixed demand for cider, intensive planting frees land elsewhere. Whether that land then becomes anything of value is a separate question, and one the cider industry does not control. What can be said plainly is that the bush orchard is a good way to grow fruit and a poor habitat, and no amount of orchard imagery on a label changes either half of the sentence.