Was out walking today and passed an unusual suburb site: a front garden apple tree, laden with red fruit & with many dropped into the remaining narrow strip of grass, the rest being monoblocked.
I have not seen an apple tree in the front garden. The interwar suburb, in my memory, was thick with apple and other fruit trees: our house had an apple tree at the top and we would swap excess fruit with next door, who had a plum and a pear tree.
I imagine that these trees were planted by keen new householders, or even thrown in by the builders. But much of the suburb was laid over farmland: and my grandparents' house was one of many built around a farmhouse, the farm having presumably sold off their land (the shrunken farm lingered on into the 1950s or 60s before being replaced by a primary school). In these cases, fruit trees appeared oddly in gardens: a parcelled out orchard.
I tried to get a photo of today's tree, but the householder wanted to know what I was doing.
Folk Suburb Landscape, Ordinary Tradition, Folk Suburb, Weird Folk
I bet they did!
ReplyDeleteI love the image you conjure. You have also reminded me that I must check our tree.