Lament For An Orchard

Bulmers is selling off our local orchard. They are uprooting all the trees because the land will fetch a better price without them. So the trees stand there, piled up together, their naked roots exposed to the sky. Perhaps they feel shame.

I don’t think it’s fanciful to imagine that trees uprooted in this way might feel shame, and that there might be some hidden urge to protest against this violation of their sovereignty and beauty. Bulmers will no doubt argue that the orchard is relatively new, planted within the last twenty years, and that the land will be returned to its original agrarian state, assuming we believe that. They will no doubt assume that we will forget all about the orchard and its uproarious crowd of blossom which normally would be showing signs of appearing around now, or the luminous redness of its fruit in late summer. Perhaps they argue that those who will live in houses built on the pillaged land (the time will surely come when that happens, whatever anyone says about current planning constraints) won’t give a thought to the trees, even though the new housing estate they will live on may be called The Orchards. The violence done to the place in the name of commerce will have been smoothed over by then and forgotten, vastly outweighed by the losses cut and the benefits incurred by Bulmers.

I have been trying to rationalise my unruly feelings in regard to this minor rape of the landscape – minor compared to developments, drills, mines and excavations undertaken on a much vaster scale in other parts of the country. But perhaps my feelings are justified because violence, whatever form it takes should always be resisted. I’m thinking right now of the violence, still relatively unremarked, but all the more dangerous for being so, we’re seeing coming out of China and its control of Hong Kong. Draconian measures are being put in place for the slightest infringement of China’s ‘security’ laws beginning with a crackdown on writers and artists that hails back to the Cultural Revolution. Violence is inevitably inflicted on those with the least power who are also those a violent and paranoid regime will most fear.

And this returns me to the trees, because their power lies in their beauty and in the uncompromising redness of the apples. The violence being done to them by a large corporation feels like a form of sacrilege, perhaps because the trees and the apples speak of the potency of the Eden myth, something beautiful taken unlawfully, an act that would prefigure rapes and pillages of every kind down through the centuries, culminating in the final moment of triumphant resistance to violence in the vulnerability of the Holy One, the author of all life and beauty, who is struck in the face by a soldier. The soldier is probably still slightly drunk from the previous night spent torturing this same victim.  As with all violent acts, the shame ultimately devolves on the perpetrator, but for now it belongs to the Holy One – and to the trees being uprooted by Bulmers.