In the third extract from Incredible! Joanna Dobson describes how planting fruit trees has made a world of difference to a visit to the doctor…
Planting the way to health, courtesy of Incredible Edible Todmorden
Up and down the country this week, people of all shapes, sizes and ages have been out planting trees for National Tree Week.
Forty years ago, Plant a Tree in ’73 was launched in the wake of Dutch Elm Disease, which had already destroyed more than 20 million trees. This year, the week, organised by the Tree Council, was overshadowed by Chalara fraxinea, or ash dieback.
It’s not only spectacular landscape trees that are important, though. Fruit and nut trees are also vital for wildlife and it is sobering to think that since the 1950s, more than two-thirds of England’s orchards have been lost, most of them grubbed up as a result of the food industry’s preference for larger, commercial orchards that concentrate on a few types of apple that are easy to store and produce the uniform fruits so beloved of supermarkets.
Thanks to the Incredible Edible initiative in Todmorden, volunteers have planted more than 1,000 fruit and nut trees around the town in the past six years. There are dozens of different varieties of apple, along with cherry, pear, apricot, hazelnut and others. And of course anyone can help themselves to as much of the fruit as they like.
The story of Incredible Edible is told in the book that writer Joanna Dobson has co-authored with one of the movement’s founders, Pam Warhurst. In this extract they describe how one of the Todmorden’s most eye-catching plantings, the orchard around the health centre, came about.
In 2008 a magnificent new health centre had been built in Todmorden. It cost an eye-watering £10 million and had an enormous car park with a planting scheme of the kind of prickly, low-maintenance bushes that you see around public buildings everywhere.
Once you start to think about the importance of local food, though, this kind of planting seems bonkers. Why use berberis and pyrocantha when you could have quince and pears? Why plant ornamental grasses when you could cover the ground with rosemary, thyme and other sweet smelling herbs?
A few years before the health centre opened, Incredible Edible co-founder Mary Clear had been on a civic trip to Poland with one of our local GPs, Dr William Okanga, who had trained there and was keen to build links between the two countries. What struck Mary most was the amount of food that people grew in their gardens and how there were hardly any items like cabbages and apples in the local shops because people were growing so many of their own. So in 2009, when Incredible Edible Todmorden set its sights on transforming the health centre, she suspected she would have a willing ally in Dr Okanga.
She was right: he just loved her suggestion that they should pull up the ugly, prickly shrubs and replace them with edibles. He put it to his fellow doctors and managed to persuade them that we would take care of the new plants and not just leave them to run wild. So now you can actually pick your five a day as you go into the health centre. We have planted scores of fruit trees in all the car park beds, along with strawberries on the strip of land outside Dr Okanga’s surgery window, to remind him of his days in Poland. There are fruit bushes too, not just the obvious things like gooseberries and blackcurrants but goji and jostaberries as well.
The book tells you more about how edible planting is changing the way people in Todmorden are seeing their town, and how it’s making them think about far more than what they eat.
The Canadian settler Nelson Henderson once said that the true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit. In similar vein, Pam Warhurst calls Incredible Edible a ‘forever project’. Order your copy and help play a part in the story.
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