It’s that slight ‘pop’ the skin makes when you bite into the flesh and the dark crimson juice bursts out, warm from the sunlight and picked straight from the tree. And I swear every one tastes a little different, almost like rather fruity vintages of the same wine, each more or less sharp or sweet or even faintly boozy. It doesn’t happen with the chilled jet-set cherries flown in, however novel they might first seem. A fresh picked English cherry from an established tree has a far more complex flavour to me than, say, the much heralded local asparagus. I say this as someone who is utterly addicted. In fact I’m well on my way to beating the finches and robins at their game and devouring as many as I possibly can – from the first ones still sour and firm to the last all bloated with thick juice and sweetness.
Rediscovering curious local varieties became a passion, and the few remaining cherry trees in Buckinghamshire, once wild and now tamed to the point of extinction, are of particular interest. The chalk rich soil of the Chilterns had a curious effect on cherry trees; it brought out a bright acidity in the juice and made the fruit particularly fine for turning into cherry wine or steeping in spirit. The dark crimson juice, verging on jet black, would be strained and used for dying cloth and yarn. The black cherry fruit and stones would be bruised distilled with herbs, much like eau du vie, and made into a treatment for convulsions in children. But it needed to be made with skill; too many cyanide-rich stones caused a violent end. Alfred Taylor’s book on poisons from 1859 gives a particularly gruesome account of the writhing painful death of a young girl who mistakenly ate too many cherry kernels.
These Buckinghamshire trees, with names like Black Eagle, Black Bud, and Nimble Dick, are part of an extraordinary horticultural palimpsest that contains the last of these orchards that were once so vital and prosperous. Though Kent has become the fruit basket of Britain, the truth is that most English counties would have groups of small orchards, family run over generations, that provided food, employment and a sense of community to towns where together everyone would help care for the trees and pick the fruit when it was ripe. But now there are very few of these orchards remaining, without the labour to sustain them and with the value of the land worth more for housing than sustaining an unwanted fruit supply. Often though, people tell to me, “I have an old cherry tree in my garden” and these remain as a fragile reminder of our forgotten agricultural past.
Wild black cherry trees have existed through Britain since prehistoric times, though it was once thought that they were introduced by the Romans. According to Dr. Chris Stevens, a leading expert in archaeobotany based at Wessex Archaeology, the Prunus avium species of wild cherry found in Britain has been identified in wood samples found in excavations from around 8000BC. “It probably arrived, like many of these early plants, when Britain was still joined to the mainland and literally coming in through gradual colonisation. So it could be carried by animals or as seeds drifting like twigs in the rain. There is always the remote possibility, of course, that it does come in with people very early on. That may have occurred with hazel so it is possible the cherry was introduced that way.” It’s these trees that were cultivated and adapted to form the old black orchard varieties found locally.
Some years ago, I visited the garden of Maurice Randall, where there are a few of these old cultivated trees, planted by his grandfather in the early 20th century and once part of a vigorous orchard that provided income and a fair bit of enjoyment during the hectic summer months. I was first told about Maurice and his trees by Judy and Derek Tolman at Bernwode Plants in Lugershall, an important nursery working to save old rare varieties of English fruit trees. Judy and her husband collect scion wood from endangered trees and graft them on to carefully cherry selected root stock. Their work is essential to the preservation of our heritage, but it takes a year to establish a new sapling and there’s usually a waiting list for their young trees. Judy has rescued cuttings from Maurice’s garden and is now re-establishing these for homes in the area.
So early one spring time, I went to visit Maurice to see these trees after he telephoned to say that the blossom was out. As we sat shivering on the bench at the end of his garden, having manoeuvred down the path between the very thick stemmed rhubarb and a furrowed patch of dirt just waiting for the first potatoes and beets to peep through, I could barely see in the fading light this stump of a tree that, to me, looked quite dead. “Is there some blossom on that cherry, the one that’s been cut badly?” asked Maurice. “I would go and look but since my hip replacement the walk gets too wobbly for me”, he says. So I go over and look close up. Sprouting from the blunt severed edge of the branches high up were four slender new growths covered with tufts of pure white blossom, an extraordinary attempt by nature battling against the odds to maintain life in this 100 year old cherry tree.
So how did it get cut so badly? “I did it,” says Maurice with deep regret, “it had grown so high I couldn’t gather the fruit so I cut the top branches off hoping that would grow out some new growth lower down. It did in places but not very much and it’s really had it, hasn’t it?” This stump was one of the last remaining Black Bud cherry trees that used to be so common in Buckinghamshire but, as orchard land gave way to housing and interest faded in British fruit, trees were lost and not replaced. If I’d have had a giant old fruit tree in my garden I probably would have done the same as Maurice, and I suspect many of the remaining trees in the county risk the same fate. However romantic the idea of an old cherry tree is, the practicalities of caring for it and harvesting the fruit become rather troubling.
“You see, this was my play area as a kid”, Maurice explains, “there were none of these houses here. You see the old white house up there? My grandfather had that built in 1908, and that was about the time he planted these trees. There were about nine cherry trees as I can remember, and of course he had two or three up there on the hill as well. I was born over there in the miller’s house” he says pointing at a small white building in the distance. “There used to be a chalk mill there but it burned down in the 1800s. The men used to collect the chalk and grind it up to spread back on the fields.”
Summertime in Buckinghamshire was cherry time, and nothing could rival their cherry pie. Essentially it was a pastie, looking to the rest of us like a Cornish invader but it’s shape was simply the best way to easily trap the fruit inside and capture all the juice. Even the stones would be left in, adding a slight bitter almond flavour to the filling. William Hone, writing in one of those yearbooks filled with both trivia and life’s essentials in 1841, describes the pasty this way:
“Those districts have from time immemorial been accustomed to make pasties, which are by them highly esteemed for their delicious flavour; some even considering them fit to set before a king. Entertainments called “The Pasty Feasts,” in which the above mentioned niceties shine conspicuous, are always duly observed, and constitute a seasonable attraction for all ages, but more particularly for the juveniles, whose laughter teeming visages begrimed with the exuberant juice present unmistakeable evidence of their having a finger in the pie…They have entirely escaped the notice of the professed writers on the culinary art, from Mrs. Glasse of the old school, down to Mrs. Rundell and Dr. Kitchener of the moderns.”
So during cherry picking time these pasties would be made, washed down with last year’s cherry wine or just beer. “My wife used to make some big one’s for me to take to work. I’d put them in my lunchbox, that was smashing. I’ve got a sweet tooth!” says Maurice. I tried my hand at making them before visiting the Randalls, hoping to impress them with my enthusiasm. I had some black Wellington cherries I’d bottled from Brogdale in Kent, so I strained those, tossed them in a little flour and sugar and encased them in a buttery rough puff pastry. They looked marvellous. But so wrong I found out. “They need to be in a very simple shortcrust pastry”, explained Maurice’s wife Norma, “made with half a pound of flour, 2oz butter and 2oz lard, a pinch of salt and a little sugar, and just a little water to bind it. It’s just an ordinary pastry but then you put caster sugar on top before you bake. You don’t want too much filling inside, just the cherries and the sugar, and don’t stone the cherries!”
So I went back and made them again, and on the next trip took them to show Steve and Sharon Hollings at The Plough at Cadsden, a pub just a stone’s throw from Chequers and a drinking hole that Edward Heath was known to visit. Sharon looked at the pasties and decreed, “they’re perfect! Just the way they should be.” Every August, the Plough hosts a hugely popular cherry pie feast, much like the fair championed by local cherry guru Helen Lindsey-Clark at the Seer Green CE Combined School. The event at the Plough was rekindled six years ago after the pub had gone through a bleak rough time, and Steve and Sharon were desperate to start up something that was resoundingly English and fun. Set on the edge of the forest, the feast has dunking for apples in barrels and traditional dishes to eat. However it’s the cherries that make it special. “We just use local cherries if we can get them”, says Steve, “it gives a much better flavour as the flesh is so dark and very sweet.”
Finding the cherries is difficult though as the orchards have all but vanished. Perhaps it sounds like a simple loss of old ways that were no longer relevant. The truth is that the place these trees held in our landscape is complex and their removal and loss is likely to have far reaching consequences. I spoke with Tom Oliver, Head of Rural Policy at CPRE, to ask whether it’s a bit of a fool’s game trying to preserve old orchard trees against the more obvious needs of town planning.
“The short answer is that these trees do need to be preserved,” says Tom, “because they fall into a category which is not really safeguarded by any other means presently established and because they are quite rare, or very rare in some cases, and irreplaceable because of their long term characteristics. The thing about old orchards, and the sites of old orchards, is that usually it’s not just the fruit that one is interested in but also the habitat which old trees provide for an enormous range of plant and animal species. And one is also interested in the sward, the grass below, because almost by definition the grass has been there for many years as unimproved pasture which has its own interesting mixture of flora and fauna, and those things aren’t replicable by just finding a field and planting trees in it. Even if you replant the right varieties, the right root stock and introduce sympathetic land management, there just isn’t the same inheritance of interesting flora and fauna which you get with an old orchard.”
In Maurice’s garden these trees have attracted a few of the very rare orange-tipped butterfly, and a few of the blue ones too, drawn to something in his orchard. It could be the old cherry trees, who knows. But with more trees replanted there is a chance that other rare species will return and with them a great deal of cherry celebration.
