Orchard

Orchard takes you through the life of an ancient orchard in England with a chapter for every month of the year. The book beautifully describes the natural history and ecology of the orchard - including the relationship of humans to the orchard and its denizens. This is a system with extraordinary biodiversity where humans steward the environment, and while people harvest from it, the agricultural practices don't just make for bountiful harvests of apples and pears - they support a resilient, highly functional ecosystem.

It reminded me a bit of 1491 where you see people shaping an ecosystem to produce more things useful to humans but maintaining extraordinary resilience and biodiversity - and not requiring lots of external inputs (like fertilizers from fossil fuel).

Sometimes the noble savage tropes creep into modern environmental thinking, but this book made me think about how the ancestors of folks practicing and relying on the kind of exploitative and unsustainable agricultural system we have today knew very well how work with the native plants and animals to make a living.

Not that I'm arguing to go back to some idyllic agrarian age, but even white Europeans and their descendants have traditional knowledge that we could learn to use again.

I really appreciated the structure - months as chapters - of this book. I read along over the course of a year and it was satisfying to feel the year change around me as the orchard moved through its own seasons. It made me wish I could participate in the seasonality of my own landscape better. And perhaps I will!

The snowdrops are blooming today and the ravens are circling.