#503: Local Distinctiveness

Common Ground has a "local distinctiveness" section to their website.

With the increasing homogenisation of the landscape and culture and the rise of AI slop, it's important to cherish those 'local' differences which can be explored using local fieldwork.

#135: 21st October: Apple Day

Today is Apple Day, which was started by Common Ground in 1990.

I have blogged about Common Ground and their work previously.

The aspiration was to create a calendar custom, an autumn holiday. 

From the start, Apple Day was intended to be both a celebration and a demonstration of the variety we are in danger of losing, not simply in apples, but in the richness and diversity of landscape, ecology and culture too. 

It has also played a part in raising awareness in the provenance and traceability of food.

It would also make an interesting context for some work exploring the cultural dimension of food and how important this particular fruit is to people in the UK. There used to be far more diversity in the apples that were sold, but we now import fruit instead, despite the abundance of British varieties.

Of the 2,000 culinary and dessert apples, and hundreds more cider varieties, which have been grown in this country, only a few handfuls are widely known and used today.

Image source: Common Ground

This site shows the reasons behind the development of the day by the Common Ground founders.

In 1987, Sue Clifford and Angela King at Common Ground became aware of the sharp decline in traditional orchards in the British Isles since the 1950s whilst conducting research for the Trees, Woods and the Green Man project. They recognised that this decline not only had an ecological impact on the British landscape, but also signified a loss of associated cultural practices. Not only would we lose regional fruit varieties, local distinctiveness, and richness of wildlife, but knowledge of recipes, stories, songs, and skills such as planting, grafting and pruning would also diminish. To raise awareness of this issue, the charity launched its Save Our Orchards and Community Orchards campaigns, which sought to encourage and ‘a-peel’ to people to protect traditional orchards, as well as create new community orchards.

Realising it was ‘crunch’ time for orchards, in 1990, Common Ground introduced a new initiative to further protect and promote the ecological and cultural importance of orchards – a calendar custom which it named Apple Day.

Many UK farmers are grubbing up their orchards due to unprofitability, despite a growth of interest in ciders, particularly fruit-based ones.

From the article linked to above:

Orchards are now a very rare habitat in Britain, replaced by farms and urban development. England and Wales have lost 56% of their orchards since 1900. Traditional orchards have been hit particularly hard with a decline of 81%, equivalent to an area almost the size of the West Midlands.

As habitats they offer huge benefits for carbon sequestration and wildlife, particularly pollinators and birds.

I can see one project in schools which offer the GCSE Natural History to be the planting of at least one fruit tree by those students taking the course, which may not produce fruit in the time they are at school, but will by the time their children start school. This sort of longer term thinking is important.

This Reuters piece explains the economic decisions that farmers have for deciding to uproot orchards.

#81: Natural History Reading List #6: England in Particular

Common Ground was an organisation which was founded by Sue Clifford, Angela King and Roger Deakin in 1983.

One of their most impressive publications is called 'England in Particular'. It is a hefty tome which I have in my library. I've seen copies in second hand book shops / charity shops several times over the years - check Oxfam in particular for books.

It is subtitled: "A Celebration of the Commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive".

It is one of the most interesting books to come out of their work, and takes the form of a large A-Z compendium of distinctiveness, very nicely illustrated.

The entries range across landscape elements, myths, folklore, villages, country life, natural history, botany, entomology, riparian ecosystems and everything in between.

In a review by Mark Cocker, he praises the book for its diversity:

"It involves a complex blend of archaeology, anthropology, social and natural history, ecology and simple storytelling. It also incorporates the numerous voices of people who have submitted to the authors their own experience of English landscapes.

Their items resolve into six broad categories: plants, trees and vegetational communities; wild animals; various forms of rustic food, often fruits and vegetables; architectural structures and styles; rural traditions and festivals. The sixth category involves elements so broad in theme one might consider them abstractions, such as their essays on "Facing North" or "The Weather"."

He also reminds us of the importance of this diversity and vernacular landscape elements.

"Once you homogenise a landscape in the way that we see across large parts of central England, you not only lose the wildlife, you rob its inhabitants of the elements that make up their identity. The antiseptic uniformity of many English high streets is part analogue, part consequence of the surrounding countryside's wider sterilisation."

The book is over 500 pages long and features articles of differing length, and lovely illustrations in a range of styles. Some of the entries are for geographical features such as rias.

Here's a sample from the contents pages:

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license.