The scale of orchard loss, and how it is known

Orchard area in Britain peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has fallen since. The decline accelerated sharply after the Second World War, driven by a combination of pressures: food policy that favoured arable production, the mechanisation of farming which made large tree-studded fields inconvenient, the shift of commercial cider fruit into intensive bush plantings, the end of the farm-labour economy that made small farm orchards worth keeping, and grant schemes that at various points actively paid for orchard removal.

The loss was not evenly distributed. Counties with substantial small farm orchards — Devon among them — lost proportionately more than counties where orchards were concentrated in commercial holdings, and the losses fell hardest on the traditional standard orchards rather than on the intensive plantings that replaced part of their output. Perry pear orchards, being slow to establish and unattractive to replant, were disproportionately affected and have never been rebuilt.

Loss continued after the main period of clearance, in a quieter form. Orchards that are not grubbed still disappear if trees die and are not replaced, and an orchard reduced to a handful of surviving veterans in a field of scrub will eventually cease to be an orchard at all without anyone having made a decision.

For a long time orchard loss was asserted rather than measured, because there was no systematic record of where orchards were. The Traditional Orchard Habitat Inventory, developed by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species with Natural England, changed that. Orchards were identified from aerial imagery, mapped as polygons, and then checked on the ground by volunteers, who recorded what was actually there: how many trees, of what age and condition, over what sward.

Comparison with historic maps, on which orchards were conventionally marked, gives the change over time. That comparison is what converts a general impression of decline into a figure, and it also exposes how much is uncertain: the definitions used by historic surveyors were not those of the modern inventory, and a hedgerow orchard or a scatter of trees around a farmstead may or may not have been recorded.

This is why the figures should be handled with the caveats attached rather than quoted flatly. A percentage loss depends on what baseline year is used, on what counted as an orchard then, and on whether area or number of orchards is being measured. The direction and rough magnitude are not in doubt; the second decimal place is not real.

The inventory’s more uncomfortable finding is about the state of what is left. A large share of surviving traditional orchards were assessed as being in declining or poor condition: over-mature trees with no replanting, gaps that have not been filled, swards either improved or abandoned to scrub, and no active management. An orchard in that state is on a trajectory, and the trajectory ends with its disappearance.

This matters for how the problem is understood. If the issue were only grubbing, planning protection and grant support against removal would address it. Because much of the remaining loss is attrition through neglect, the effective interventions are different: replanting to fill gaps, restorative pruning, and re-establishing a grazing or cutting regime for the sward.

It also means the headline numbers understate the position. A count of surviving orchards includes those that are functionally at the end of their lives, and treating extent as the whole measure would suggest a stability that the condition data contradicts.

Part of the lost fruit production was replaced by intensive bush orchards, which is why national cider output rose across the same period that orchard area fell. In production terms the substitution largely worked. In habitat terms it did not substitute at all, because a bush orchard supplies none of the features that made the old orchards valuable, and it was never intended to.

Replanting has happened, driven by agri-environment schemes, community orchard projects, county orchard groups and small cider producers, and it is real. It is also, in area terms, small relative to what was lost, and it takes decades before a new standard orchard begins to deliver the habitat features of an old one. Planting now is a bet on the second half of this century.

The honest summary is that the loss was mostly a rational response to changed economics, that the habitat consequences were largely unintended and were not counted at the time, and that they are counted now. Whether that recognition arrived early enough to keep the noble chafer and the rest of the assemblage in the landscape is not yet settled.