Apples

 Sifting through my photos on Flickr I came across photos of some of the fruit I grew.  Each apple tree planted with a certain amount of hope and now probably uprooted.  There is nothing quite like apple blossom in the spring.  As a child I grew up in a garden with large fruit trees probably planted in the late Victorian time.  We climbed those trees my brother and I, settled in their large branches and saw the apples stored in golden coloured large baskets down in the cellar.  The sweet smell always hitting your nose when you raised the latch to the cellar.

So the Bath garden which was a good size and went across a small valley was ideal for the fruit trees.   we have lost the great apple orchards of this country, especially Kent.  Nowadays go into the supermarkets and buy sour foreign plums, or pay a price for the Pink Lady apple but the great variety of English apples have been lost to the orchards being 'grubbed up' as not profitable.

Even the famous Bramley apple original tree of which its many cuttings went to be planted in many an orchard is now dying of disease, but at least we have its children.

May King

Deacon Pears

I have several books all from the 1930s, such names as H. J. Massingham, Dorothy Hartley and Edward Thomas all figure within them.  They write about the English countryside with such passion and nostalgia (gosh they would be heartbroken now if they saw the great fields decimated of their hedgerows).  

The books are all printed by the publisher Batsford, I wonder if they still operate?  I remember years ago a Batsford person came down to discuss one of my late husband's books to be published.

My daughter has just come in to tell me that Mollie the cat is raising hell, she has a very loud voice, about the fact that the the door to the attic room is shut and she can't go in. This is because the bed has been made up in there for Matilda who is coming down tomorrow.  It is cheaper for Matilda to have her hair done in Todmorden then London!

There are some lovely black and white photos in the books.  An idyllic countryside with the farmworkers laying the hedges, or bringing in the harvest.  Farms nestled in valleys and spring time orchards and of course the hop pickers from London down in the Kentish countryside.