As I prune one of our pears – a black Worcester, incidentally, a British variety from the 13th century – I ponder the linguistic connections that arise from our garden “acre” in a place called “Hogshaw”. The first word derives from Old English æcer, meaning an “acorn”. It was linked to wildwood, where the people would fatten their swine on wild pears, apples and oak mast. An acre of pig woodland (or hog shaw) was probably the land required to feed one beast for the winter. I wonder, therefore, how many pigs were put to pannage in our original Hogshaw for it to have acquired its name permanently?
Another thought arising as I clip away the three Ds – dead, diseased or damaged wood – is how much orchards are founded on connection and sharing. I’m not just thinking of the veilwort (a liverwort) on many branches, nor the bristle moss that gives colour and body to every lovely limb, but also the fact that we relied on previous owners to plant trees and their successors to prune them. We also depend totally for our fabulous pear harvest on pollinators, which I’ve mainly found here to be solitary bees. To date, we’ve recorded 19 bee species.
To help our orchard neighbours, I’ve sown the gaps with yellow rattle and encouraged our prolific ox-eye daisies and knapweed, all of which both feed and require insects. This whole complex of open ground interspersed with trees and bushes mimics a habitat that is scarce and previously undervalued in Britain. The best indicator of our disdain is its name: scrub. As well as a word for low and stunted trees, scrub referred to a mean, insignificant fellow, a drudge and a skin infection.
It is, in truth, one of our most important landforms, given that it supports thousands of species including hundreds that are rare or threatened. As I prune, I’m pondering an alternative word for this patch, especially since it is full of apples, pears, plums, hawthorns, rowans and blackberries, all of which are in the rose family. Let’s call it firdaus, the original Persian for an enclosed orchard, but you’ll know my synonym for scrub by its English equivalent: paradise.
