Gloucestershire Orchard Group

Conserves, promotes and celebrates traditional orchards in Gloucestershire

An overview

Seventy-five per cent of Gloucestershire's orchards have been lost in the past 50 years. Agricultural changes and lack of demand, foreign competition and finally the supermarket all aided the demise of many local orchards and varieties. Despite this decline, Gloucestershire still has areas where orchards form a strong traditional landscape character, The Berkeley Vale and Dymock area still contain a noticeable number of orchard trees with many local varieties.

The early 90's saw an orchard revival. The Great Storm led to a realisation that the remaining orchards were under great threat.

Survey work carried out by the county council's landscape architects in 1991 led to a landscape strategy. Key landscape features that showed neglect, including orchards, were chosen to become target areas for action. In 1992 the county's 'Restoring our Landscape' grant was introduced which has since resulted in over 3000 orchard trees being planted. The council also put together an information pack listing local varieties, suppliers and advice on planting.

Many local varieties are endangered and in many cases only one tree remains, resulting in a high percentage of Gloucestershire varieties being lost. To stem this decline local varieties have been located, identified, grafted or budded over the last 10 years. The now certified varieties have now been budded on to create a public bank of trees to be used as mother trees. The next stage is to create a museum orchard for the county.

Overall, orchard loss has now stabilised especially with public interest in old apple varieties. Farm shops and markets are also helping re-establish a "taste' revival, with local apple and plum selections. It will take time to re-educate people's palates. This is important as we need to have a market for traditional varieties other than home consumption. But we feel the tide has turned.