Wicor Orchard

A walk around our grounds today showed just how much has happened in the last few weeks.  Our blogging had stopped while we were concentrating on our SATs tests, but they have finished and we are back outside.

The orchard was where we stopped and serenity was all around us but this was a site walk so we didn’t dally…well not too much. 

The large amount of yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor) which was flowering away amongst the grasses and which has spread magnificently since last year really hit us first.  Yellow rattle is a native semi-parasitic grassland annual and was sown 3 years ago when we decided to get a wild flower meadow going in the orchard area which had been laid to grass.   We knew when the Year 6 children sowed the three years ago the yellow rattle would be difficult and unpredictable to germinate but we needed it to take for its parasitic nature.  Creating the wild flower meadow has been a two-stage process with the yellow rattle being sown and germinated first, to reduce the grassland and allow other wild flower seed mixes thrown alongside to germinate.  Yellow rattle is so important for reclaiming grasslands and helping wild flowers take hold; it is now part of the Natural England’s (2009) plan to diversify grasslands and support native wildlife.  Our yellow rattle looked beautiful laying in large swathes of translucent gentle yellows across the entire orchard.  Other wildflowers have also taken hold with corncockles, red clover plus the beautiful and fragile vetches with their pea shoots twining with and spreading through the grasses. 

Within our heritage orchard the many trees are now showing small apples starting to form and grow.  Amongst them is our one quince tree whose soft pink blooms are so heavily and intoxicatingly scented.  This quince tree threw us a bit of a mystery last year – we had one quince growing, and we nurtured it, watching, waiting for that moment ready to harvest it.  When the time came… it had gone. Where it went we shall never know!

If you had read our earlier blogs you would have stumbled across one where we described trying to transfer some mistletoe seeds from our Headteacher’s garden onto the branches of trees within our orchard.    Well, the exciting news is that we think one of the seeds might have taken.  This one little seed has brought so much excitement.  We will watch and wait.

Badgers are still using our orchard as a busy thoroughfare with three new paths having been pushed under the fencing and cut through the long grasses.  Their trails criss-cross through the orchard with the occasional area of flattened grasses as if they have stopped to admire the view too and under the scots pines you’ll find their latrines are still being used.

 

The Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) which shelters our storytelling area is now looking lustrous.  We decided to take a closer look at this tree as it is one of only a few evergreen trees on the site and has lots of new vertical growth shoots at the moment.  We found out that the needles on young scots pine trees grow longer than those on older trees, it is only one of three native evergreens (juniper, yew and Scots pine) and the only true native cone bearing tree of the United Kingdom.  It is also the only native conifer grown commercially for timber in the UK.  Mature trees can grow up to 35m and live for up to 700 years.  We used our maths knowledge to work out the height of the tree using both a ratio stick and then again with a clinometer and we think ours is approaching 30m tall – it is certainly a beauty.  Close observation showed the bark to be a scaly orange/brown towards the top of the tree (or crown) and darker brown bark at the bottom (or base) of the trunk, which we weren’t expecting, and it develops something called plates and fissures as it gets older.  The twigs are hairless and browny-green with its leaves being needle-like and a bluey-green.  They are also slightly twisted with pairs of needles on the short shoots and will stay on trees for 2-3 years with the old needles turning yellow in September or October when they are shed.   These trees are monoecious which means that both male and female flowers grow on the same tree, and our pictures show the male cones.  Scots Pine trees use wind pollination, and once pollinated the female flowers turn green and develop into the brown cones we are used to seeing, maturing the following season so there are always cones of different ages on one tree.  The really mature cones have a raised circular bump at the centre of each scale and are a grey-brown. 

We also found out that after the end of the last Ice Age, approximately 10,000 years ago, Scots pine, spread northwards from Europe into Britain and reached a maximum spread about 6,000 years ago. Today the Scots pines cover about 170 km² which is just over 1% of the 15000 km² original area - most of this is in the Caledonian forest which takes its name from the Romans, who called Scotland ‘Caledonia’, meaning ‘wooded heights’.

A bit more digging around and we found out that the young pine needles are used for their antiseptic effect, and that the essential use from this tree can be added to baths to treat fatigue and inhalers for chest complaints!

 

Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Woodnotes"