Restoring a neglected orchard

The first task is to find out what the orchard is. That means mapping the trees, assessing each for condition and safety, recording which are veterans with significant deadwood features, and identifying the cultivars as far as possible. It also means looking at the sward: whether it has been improved, whether it carries waxcaps or anthills, and whether it has been grazed or abandoned.

Cultivar identification is worth taking seriously and worth taking help with. Old orchards frequently contain locally raised varieties that were never planted commercially, and a proportion of what survives nationally of some cultivars is a handful of trees in orchards like these. County orchard groups, the national collection and DNA fingerprinting are the routes to an answer, and the identification is also a decision about what to propagate.

A restoration plan should state its priorities explicitly, because they sometimes conflict. An orchard being restored primarily for fruit production will be pruned and replanted differently from one being restored primarily for habitat, and the second will retain trees and wood that the first would remove. Most restorations are a mixture, and being clear about the balance prevents the two objectives quietly cancelling each other out.

An old tree that has not been pruned for decades will have a crowded, tangled crown with dead wood, crossing branches and a great deal of shaded interior. The temptation is to open it up in one winter. The result of doing that is a violent flush of vigorous water shoots the following summer, produced from stored reserves the tree cannot afford, followed by dieback — and on a genuinely old tree, sometimes death.

The accepted approach is staged reduction: remove no more than a modest proportion of the live crown in any one season, spread the work over three to five years, and let the tree respond between interventions. Start with the clearly dead, diseased and crossing wood; then reduce the height and spread of over-extended limbs to lower the mechanical and wind load; then thin the interior gradually to let light in.

Cuts should be made to appropriate points rather than left as stubs, since stubs die back and provide an entry for canker. Work in dry weather where possible for the same reason. And on veteran trees the objective is not a tidy shape but a stable one — a reduced, balanced crown that the trunk can carry for another few decades.

Almost every neglected orchard has lost trees, and replacing them is the only way it continues to exist beyond the life of the current veterans. New trees should be on vigorous or semi-vigorous rootstocks to match the existing structure, planted at the original spacing, and protected properly from stock and wildlife — a new tree planted in a grazed orchard without a guard has a short future.

Where possible the replacements should be grafted from the orchard’s own trees. That keeps a locally distinctive cultivar mix in place, guarantees suitability to the site, and propagates varieties that may exist in very few other places. It also takes a year or two longer than buying nursery trees, which is a reason it is often not done.

Replant disease is a practical constraint: a new tree planted exactly where an old apple tree stood will grow poorly. Planting into the gaps between old positions, or accepting slower establishment, is the usual response. It is also worth planting successors well before the veterans fail, because habitat continuity depends on there being old trees at every point in time rather than a generational gap.

Restoring the grassland is half the job and receives a fraction of the attention. An abandoned orchard sward accumulates coarse grasses, bramble and scrub, which shade out the finer flora, smother the anthills and make fruit impossible to gather. Reinstating grazing, or a hay cut followed by aftermath grazing, reverses that over several seasons.

Where the sward has instead been agriculturally improved, recovery is slower and less certain. Fertility, once raised, comes down only gradually, and the plant and fungal communities that were lost do not necessarily return on their own. The realistic objective in that case is to stop further improvement and manage for gradual reduction rather than to expect an old sward to reappear.

Getting the timing right matters for the orchard as a whole. Stock have to be off before the fall and the sward has to be short when it begins, which means the grazing calendar and the harvest calendar are one plan. An orchard restoration that reinstates the trees and ignores the ground has restored half a habitat and will find the fruit hard to gather.