FIRST FRUIT by Roger Deakin I first encountered Newton in the company of Harvey, Cook, and Faraday, as one of the

houses at my first school. No doubt the idea behind the naming was to inspire our young minds to new heights of inquiry and discovery. Each had what would nowadays be called a logo - a pylon-and-lightning for Faraday, a heart for Harvey, a galleon for Cook. Newtons was equally original a descending apple. Newton boys in their green ties always seemed most at home in the school playground it was an orchard, with a patch of concrete at its centre. In summer, it was full of the birdsong of small boys punctuated by toots from the narrow-gauge steam railway that threaded its way between the trees, and was the headmasters passion. Boys were expected to keep the line free of windfalls, and there was a resident black manx cat who thought sleepers were for sleeping on, and whose favourite game was to leap clear at the last possible moment, causing us to speculate about its absent tail. This was my first experience of the orchard as a place to dream about in lessons, a haven from toil, a playground. But as Isaac Newton bears witness, orchards are good places for thinking too, and I now do a good deal of mine under the healing branches of an ancient Dr Harvey, although not in September, as these wonderfully cumbersome apples can weigh a pound a piece. A Dr Harvey accelerating at 23 ft per second can seriously damage your health. And there are other ways Doc Harvey can lay you flat too. The cider we brew from a mixture of these and other windfalls once put a whole Scottish folk band, famed for their prowess with the tankard as well as the fiddle, firmly under the kitchen table. Just looking at one of these gnarled giants would be enough to give a supermarket manager apoplexy. The narrow, uniform range of apples and other orchard fruit now available in our shops expresses the visual as well as the commercial obsession of our age. Taste and texture are no longer the prime criteria for fruiterers or, perforce for shoppers. But the joy of orchard fruits is their non-conformity, the pleasure of experiencing the sheer number of variations on the theme of apple, plum, pear or cherry that gardeners , nature and history have between them invented.

Yet try asking for a Lady Henniker or a Cornish Honeypin at the supermarket today. Here orchard fruit is concerned, we are subject to what G.K. Chesterton once called the anonymous tyranies of trade. Yet there are signs of hope. Our local natural food shop has built up a roaring trade in unsprayed locally grown apples, pears and plums from a wide variety of orchard trees. And if supermarkets can sell organic vegetables successfully, theres no reason why they shouldnt do the same with orchard fruit. Today, real ale, tomorrow real apples, plums, cherries, pears How strange that of all trees the fruit tree should now be so threatened, and so bereft of official protection. None of the statutory conservation bodies has shown much interest in orchards during their steady decline since the war, perhaps on the grounds that they are neither truly wild places nor composed of wild trees. (Are old orchards really any less wild than other man-made habitats like hedgerows or the Norfolk Broads?). Old orchards, with their mossed cottage-trees, can be important local havens for birds, wild flowers, lichens, bees and for the hundreds of varieties of fruit trees that could face extinction unless we take action now. That old orchards and many apple varieties should be threatened is ironic because throughout Europe, the connection of the apple tree with immortality is an ancient and widespread. It is to the Vale of Avalon, the secret island of apple-trees, that Arthur goes to heal his grievous wounde in the closing pages of Malorys Morte dArthur. And it is quite natural that our modern mythic heroes, the Beatles, should have chosen the apple as their insignia. In Arthurs day, the apple was revered as the noblest and most generous of trees. Today its once-sacred name graces a computer. We live in tasteless times. But then, all these examples are homage to the universal popularity of apples and orchards and the potency of their presence in our culture. It is time to start valuing the real thing, not just its icon. If we could reverse the decline of our orchards in Britain, the uplifting effect on the quality of our lives on our countryside, our towns, our restaurants, shops and market stalls - would be dramatic. And nobody would be more surprised than Newton to see the apple rising. Roger Deakin, for Common Ground, 1989.