The traditional standard orchard

The defining measurement is the height of clear trunk. A standard carries its lowest branches at roughly 1.8 metres or above, which puts the head of the tree out of reach of cattle. A half-standard carries them lower, at something like 1.2 to 1.5 metres, which will keep sheep out of the crown but not a cow. This is not a botanical distinction: it is a farming one, and it exists because the ground beneath the trees was always meant to be doing something else.

Getting a tree to that shape takes work in the nursery and in the first years after planting. The trunk is trained clear, the head is formed above it, and the tree is then largely left alone. Once established, a standard needs very little: an occasional removal of dead or crossing wood, and otherwise nothing. Low intervention is not an accident of neglect but a design feature, because a tree that needs annual attention across sixty hectares of grassland is a tree nobody will attend to.

Before the East Malling rootstock programme made controlled tree size routine, a fruit tree was a large tree. Grafting onto a seedling or crab rootstock gave vigour and longevity and nothing else, so the orchard had to be laid out for a tree that would eventually be six metres or more across. Wide spacing followed from that, and grazing followed from wide spacing, because the alternative was to mow it.

The result fitted a mixed farm exactly. The same hectare carried a fruit crop in autumn and a grass crop the rest of the year, and the labour needed to gather the fruit came from the farm household and, in cider counties, from a workforce that was partly paid in cider. That last arrangement — the truck system by which farm labourers received a daily allowance of cider — was outlawed in the nineteenth century but persisted informally for decades, and it explains why so much orchard was planted on farms that never sold a drop.

When those conditions ended, so did the reason to plant standards. Farm labour became expensive, cider became a factory product bought on contract, and a grower with a contract needed tonnes per hectare rather than a picturesque pasture. The standard orchard did not fail horticulturally. It stopped making sense economically, which is a different thing and matters when discussing what to do about the ones that survive.

Yield from a standard orchard is modest per hectare and irregular from year to year. The trees are far apart, a substantial fraction of them will be biennial, and there is no thinning, no irrigation and usually no fertiliser. Against that, a mature standard tree can carry a great deal of fruit, and picking is by shaking and gathering rather than by ladder, which is why the system survived as long as it did.

The fruit itself is not necessarily better than bush-grown fruit, and claims that it is should be treated carefully. What can be said with more confidence is that old standard orchards contain cultivars that were never replanted commercially, that their trees are often the last surviving stock of a local variety, and that fruit from an unsprayed, unfertilised, grazed orchard tends to carry less assimilable nitrogen — which has consequences at the fermentation stage rather than in the orchard.

Most surviving standard orchards survive because removing them cost money and keeping them cost nothing much. They are disproportionately on land that was awkward to farm otherwise: steep, wet, small, or tied up in a farmhouse curtilage. A significant number are in a condition the habitat inventory would describe as declining — over-mature trees, no replanting, and a sward that has been either improved or abandoned to scrub.

Their status changed when traditional orchards were recognised as a priority habitat in their own right. That recognition does not protect an orchard from being removed, but it does mean that a surviving standard orchard is now understood as something other than an unproductive field with trees in it, and that agri-environment funding can be directed at keeping it.