Living in Ælfric’s Orchard

Sometimes I daydream about places that aren’t real. Some of these are part of my recurring dreamscape and have taken their places in my memory like places I’ve really been. Others are places I’ve imagined. One of these is a small suburban lot, loosely based on some friends’ house and yard. I should say that I find the real-life version pleasant: pleasant in itself and pleasant because of cherished friendship. But in the imagined version, the yard has been transfigured into an orchard, with fruit trees, berry canes, grapevines, and a wealth of native perennials: a (very) smallholding.

The more I’ve daydreamed about this place, the more I’ve come to believe that living in an orchard should be a normal human experience. Even in a dense neighborhood of 1/8 acre lots, there is plenty of room for yards to become orchards. An eighth of an acre is 5,445 square feet. If the houses on such lots have roughly 1,000 sq.ft. footprints, then, even with the ground ceded to the “needs” of cars, most of the lot can be devoted to creating an orchard. In a more typical quarter-acre lot, space is ample. But why do I say an orchard? Why not just a yard or a garden? Let’s take a roundabout road to an answer.

Orchard is a good word. I like saying it, looking at it in print, and thinking about it. And yet it looks and sounds a bit odd—not easy to guess at its origins. In fact, orchard consists of two parts that sit together awkwardly. Though there is some dispute about it (see the unabridged OED), both parts derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root. In Latin this root became hortus and mainly denoted the cultivation of plants, hence the word horticulture. In the Germanic languages, it became various versions of the word yard, with the primary meaning of an enclosed space.

This divergence suggests that, in its origins, the word carried both denotations and meant something like, “an enclosed space where plants are cultivated.” That the Latin lost the sense of enclosure is indicated in the expression “hortus conclusus,” a walled garden; that the Germanic languages lost the sense of “a place with plants” is indicated in the modern British usage of the word in contradistinction to the garden, the yard being a walled and often paved place adjacent to the garden (In American we have this meaning in various compound words such as courtyard, lumberyard, and scrapyard).

Thus, when you say “orchard,” or “hort-yard,” you are, etymologically speaking, repeating yourself. But the intent behind the word is clear: it describes a walled garden, something more intricate and more beautiful than a vast monoculture of fruit trees in an otherwise barren field, like the California almond orchards. It invites the imagination to turn the handle and open the gate to an enclosed place within which many kinds of plants—trees, herbs, vegetables, and flowers—are cultivated. An orchard thus imagined represents an ideal place, one that is beautiful and comfortable to people: sheltered but not cramped or stifling, open enough to be breezy but not windswept, the light dappled and ever-shifting.

The first recorded use of “orchard” is found in Ælfric’s portion of the Old English Hexateuch, a paraphrase of the first six books of the Bible, where we find the sentence, “God ða aplantode wynsume orcerd fram frymðe, on ðam he gelogode þone man ðe he geworhte”: God then planted a winsome orchard from the beginning, and within it he placed the man that he wrought. Aelfric might have used the word geard (yard) or wyrtweard (garden, literally “wort ward”), but, for Aelfric, only orcerd carried the paradisal connotations required.

An aspect of paradise that cannot be seen, at least not at a glance, is that it is a place meant to be abided in. Thus, paradise is nothing like the beach resort we visit once, make a few memories at, and never see again. Even in fallen earthly terms, we might think of paradise as a place where many generations are born, grow up, live, and die, the physical surroundings becoming saturated with the family’s history and culture, the capital of which grows and deepens like the soil there. Part of the poignancy of the Expulsion from the Garden, other than the part about losing the friendship of God, comes from our first parents’ knowledge that they had forfeited what was meant to be a home not just for them but for their descendants. I suspect that you can see this grief—a specifically parental sorrow that they have wrecked the inheritance of their future children—on Eve’s face in the Expulsion of Masaccio.

The echoes of the Expulsion have never ceased, as we see through our endless motion, either because of disaster behind or the hope of prosperity ahead, or both. Some people—Wendell Berry’s “boomers” and Roger Scruton’s “oikophobes”—seem to relish this unsettled life. Meanwhile, some are fortunate enough to cherish and care for a family homeplace, which, though not everlasting, feels settled, a part not only of a family’s past but also its destiny. Then there are the rest of us: wannabe “stickers” and “oikophils,” who, like countless of our forebears, are compelled to detach ourselves from our roots or have no discernable roots to begin with.

To take my own case, I have multi-generational roots and most of my own history, but no homeplace, in Central Texas. Meanwhile, back in East Texas, I have multi-generational roots and a homeplace (though the home needs building), but less personal history. To go and inhabit that homeplace would mean not only leaving our friends and my job, but uprooting my wife from her own family and my children from part of their family and their familiar surroundings, including the ten-year-old house that, to them, seems eternal. So I look, longingly and with a sense of inner conflict, at my own homeplace, my own inheritance, from far off, a place to visit family but not to make a life. I know that I am not unique in this regard.

In Czeslaw Milosz’s essay “Happiness” he describes revisiting the site of his childhood home as an old man and reflects on the relationship between orchards—and hence home—and communism. The passage is worth quoting at length:

Many years later, at the age of eighty, I returned to the place of my birth and childhood. The landscape had changed, and probably those changes were more radical than any made there by man since the Middle Ages. Lithuania, an independent country before World War II, was occupied in 1940 by the Soviet Union, and the collectivization of agriculture was enforced by the Communist government. Whole villages, with their houses, yards, barns, stables, gardens, were erased. In their place stretched the open space of huge fields cultivated by tractors. I stood at the edge of a plateau above my river’s canyonlike valley and saw only a plain without a trace of the clumps of trees that once marked the emplacement of every village. Among the many definitions of Communism, perhaps one would be the most apt: enemy of orchards. For the disappearance of villages and the remodeling of the terrain necessitated cutting down the orchards once surrounding every house and hut. The idea of collective farming—grain factories instead of little peasant lots—was rational, but with a vengeance, and a similar vengeance lurking in practically every project of the planned economy brought about the downfall the Soviet system.

Orchards under communism had no chance, but in all fairness let us concede that they are antique by their very nature. Only the passion of a gardener can delight in growing a great variety of trees, each producing a small crop of fruit whose taste pleases the gardener himself and a few connoisseurs. Market laws favor a few species that are easy to preserve and correspond to basic standards. In the orchards planted by my great-grandfather and renewed by his successors, I knew the kinds of apples and pears whose very names pronounced by me later sounded exotic. [my emphases]

The process of erasure and removal that Milosz describes is more relevant to those of us in the West than we might at first think. Though it happened without (quite) the rapidity and massive loss of human life that occurred under Stalin, we too have seen an effacement of the countryside: towns and villages de-populated, hedges and fencerows torn out, farm houses and outbuildings torn down, and ploughed fields enlarged until the farm country resembles a wasteland. To us in the United States, this happened over a few decades, not a few years, but the cause was much the same: policy. The results, too, were similar: an emptied and impoverished countryside (though one whose remaining inhabitants refuse to give up) and huge, rootless urban populations. If the people of the Middle Ages turned Europe’s wilderness into a fine-grained, and close-featured countryside, industrial agriculture has done its damndest to destroy both the natural and human features of the landscape.

When I daydream about what the countryside in the Eastern U.S. could look like, I see an intricate quilt-work of smallholdings between 5 and 100 acres, each farmed in a way that builds soil, the fecundity of which then spills over into the life of families and communities. Suburbia, at least the kind that takes the car as its starting point and basic assumption, is itself an industrial product, impossible to imagine without industrial machines. But it doesn’t have to be a wasteland. In some ways, the suburbs have the possibility of “fine-grainedness” built into them. Many of the ingredients, if not the physical and social arrangements, are there: neighbors, soil, boundaries. What is lacking is fecundity, and the kind of homely and neighborly economies that both spring from it and encourage it.

Since so many of us are living a more-or-less rootless life, what should we do? Should we relish it? If we are Christians, should we deplore the state of things but choose to focus solely on our eternal home? After all, we know that “here we have no abiding city” and it is spiritually dangerous to become inordinately attached to anything, including a piece of ground. My suggestion is that we should remind ourselves of our eternal home by making an image of it, not as an idol but as an icon. The Eucharistic Liturgy is considered a foretaste of the heavenly wedding banquet. It is a purely speculative but imaginatively intriguing question to ask what might the setting of the heavenly wedding feast look like. Might it not be a transfiguration of the garden outside the Tomb, where the Fall in Eden was undone? To put it more generally, Catholic tradition teaches that Goodness, Truth, and Beauty experienced here on earth can point us, even lead us, to heaven. Ought we not then cultivate such beauty in and around our homes? And what might it look like?

Part of the answer might be that it looks like an orchard. It looks like families working together in their small plots of ground: tending, harvesting, processing, and sharing the bounty with their neighbors. In a small and very imperfect way, such places might hearken back to the orcerd of our first parents, and point us toward paradise.

If you only wanted some general inspiration along agrarian lines, this essay has already succeeded or failed. But if you’d like any practical suggestions, we can ask some more questions. What might a, say, quarter-acre home orchard look like? What could be included and how could it be arranged? Some of the more specific aspects of the answers are dictated by where one lives, but there are some principles and some elements that apply to most any temperate climate.

Shade trees should be located, selected, and planted before other elements, with the exception of paths. Put them where they will provide excellent summer—but not winter—shade for the house and a portion of the orchard. These shade trees could be nut trees, and thus be a food-contributing part of an orchard. If your orchard is on the small side, consider planting a small to medium-sized shade tree, so that, over the long term, the orchard (and for that matter the house) will not be overwhelmed by a disproportionate tree.

Select maybe a dozen fruit trees or small nut trees or shrubs to start. You do not need to leave a large amount of space between them as a commercial grower would because you can keep them small through pruning. I suggest keeping them small enough that you never need a ladder, unless you just want to climb a ladder. Prune them all, even apples and pears (which like to grow straight up), to an open habit instead of a central leader; this will keep them smaller and more accessible. I’ve read that you should be able to throw a hat or a cat—I never can remember which—clear through the branches without damage to either. I prune to cat-sized gaps; my trees are happy, and the shade beneath is light enough to allow other plants to grow there. Place them in several small groups rather than distributing them evenly, thus conserving space for other elements of the orchard.

Use your fence for berries and grapes. Speaking of the fence, I suggest a couple of things that are not conventional in the American suburb. First, fence the back of the orchard in a way that is semi-permeable rather than hermetically sealed against the breeze. You’ll have a little less privacy, but you, and your plants, will be more comfortable in the filtered breeze. The second thing is fencing the front. If you do it right, you will not be perceived as a sociopath. Keep the fence low and perforated, the archetypal American picket fence would suit perfectly. Add a welcoming gate with a grape arbor over it, and the picture is complete. What was merely your “front yard,” an empty and unloved space devoted entirely to the god Convention, is now the front half of your orchard, open enough to feel welcoming, contained enough to be its own place.

Somewhere, in the back if possible to keep the neighbors happy, devote a small space to three or four beds, maybe 4’x8’ apiece, for annual vegetables. Do not be afraid to mix in a few herbs and flowers. These add aesthetic value, draw pollinators, can help keep pests in check, and improve the soil. Despite my suggestion that these veg beds go in the back, I refuse to believe that veg gardens must be ugly, as so many people seem to. You don’t need plastic pinwheels, plastic tarps, plastic two-liter bottles, plastic weed guards, plastic pots, or plastic labels in your veg garden. You don’t need any damned plastic in your veg garden or anywhere else in your orchard at all. Your veg garden, meaning no disrespect to refugees, does not need to look like a refugee camp for plants. A more radical but potentially more beautiful option is to dispense with separate vegetable beds altogether and simply incorporate your annual veg into the more naturalistic flower and herb beds running through your orchard.

You’ll want perennials, especially native ones, for their beauty, their durability, and their importance to birds and insects. You can also blend conventional culinary herbs with your natives. Where should they go? Isn’t the space getting crowded by now? Not necessarily. Make a bed for them along the edge of the porch or patio. Even better, make guilds around or among your fruit trees. Guilds are communities of plants that grow with fruit trees in a mutually beneficial way. Much has been written and YouTubed about guilds, so I will not say more than this: many plants, even those labeled full sun, will thrive in the light, dappled shade cast by a well-pruned fruit tree. You can do a lot of gardening beneath your fruit-trees.

You need a small lawn area. To some people this may be the most obvious statement in the world. For others lawn has become the dirtiest word in the lexicon. In every contained place there needs to be breathing room, negative space where not much is happening. You need a place to spread a blanket for a picnic. You need a place to just lie comfortably on the ground and look at the clouds or the stars. On a hot day, grass is cooler than any other surface, no hotter than the air temperature. And your lawn need not be a water-, poison-, and gasolinesucking monster. Use a native or well adapted turfgrass, mow it high and seldom, and water it even less often. If it doesn’t thrive, it is the wrong grass. Don’t plant bermudagrass. You’ll never get it out of your beds.

You also need at least two sitting areas, one in the back and one in the front. You may have a porch or a patio on either side of the house, but I still suggest having a separate sitting area front and back. One area should be devoted to a firepit and the other to dining. To decide which area goes where, think about how your house is oriented. Which side is the coolest and breeziest in the summer and which is the warmest and most sheltered in the winter? Put the dining table in the summer-cool place (near the baby shade tree and, if possible, borrowing afternoon shade from the house while your shade tree grows), and put the firepit in the winter-warm place. Depending on the particulars of your site and where you’ve placed shade trees, it is possible that the south side of the house will be coolest in the summer AND warmest in the winter. If so, you might put the dining table and a firepit in one place. Still, don’t neglect at least a small sitting area in the other main part of the orchard. It may get used less, and that is fine, but you’ll still want somewhere to sit and to look at your orchard while you rest from your labors of pruning and cultivating.

Is an orchard of the kind I’ve described here less work than a conventional yard? No. No way. Not close. It is a lot more work. Is it worth it? Yes. A resounding yes. I speak from experience, yes. It gives your home a telos it would otherwise lack. It makes a suburban house into a homeplace. Also, the work is interesting. Unlike the drudgery of “yard work,” orchard work is varied, seasonal, mentally stimulating, and satisfying. Will you grow all your food? No. Probably not close. But the food you do grow will taste better than anything else you eat.

More than any of these particulars, what matters to me is this: can you see it in your mind’s eye? Can you wander through its parts and enjoy its beauty? Can you imagine a non-descript suburban tract house transformed into a foretaste of paradise?

Image Credit: Thomas Cole, “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden” (1828)