The Appeal of Mrs Toogood

I’ve told a lot of people about this blog and my orchard over the last few years, always pretending to protest that they won’t be interested but secretly desperate to bang on about my passion project. Normally, what happens after I’ve explained the vagaries of finding trees in the wild is that they smile and quickly steer the conversation towards sportsball or the weather. Every time it happens, a little bit of me dies because I always assume they will immediately find it, and by extension me, fascinating.

Sometimes though, I get a bit of buy in and latch on to these outliers with the gusto of a limpet mine. I worked with a chap in Lincoln who used to dress in the style of a Victorian shopkeeper whilst stitching together handmade notebooks. When he tried to establish common ground by mentioning that he liked foraging for fruit, little did he realise that he was strapping himself in for two years of regular updates on things arboreal. God bless him though; he never once responded with anything less than encouragement and enthusiasm. We ended up bonding over our shared love of things esoteric and ancient and I still follow his burgeoning YouTube career with interest.

I met another likely victim just before Christmas when he started attending a community meeting I am obliged to attend by way of paid employment. I’ll call him Gavin, just in case he’d rather not be associated with my foolishness. There’s nothing in his appearance that prompted me to ruminate upon his back story but it wasn’t long before I started to consider the possibility of mystical druidic powers. It was something about his commitment to incorporating hedgerow into everything he ate and his weird ability to stop eating biscuits when there were still loads left on the plate that captivated me.

A couple of weeks ago, me and Gavin were chatting over a mug of herbal tea when the subject swung away from the health benefits of smearing bee pollen on your mucus membranes and towards apples growing wild. He mentioned a couple of trees that he had seen on his travels and suggested I might want to have a look.

Unfortunately, by the time I unfolded my forest green bicycle later in the week, I had mostly forgotten the directions he had given me. My memory is not what it was. Either that or there was something shady in the tea. All I could remember was that the tree I was looking for was somewhere along Furze Lane, a little used backroad between Legbourne and Grimoldby.

I’m not going to lie, I was buzzing with excitement. Most of Lincolnshire’s commercial orchards were in the fens around Boston or over near Lincoln, and they are both a bit far to bike. The only one near Louth was William Ingall’s in Grimoldby which meant that the Furze Lane tree could be one of his, fallen from his trailer as he drove to market. If this tree isn’t from Ingall, it’s probably just some ancient hippy hurling an apple core through the window of his Capri but where’s the romance in that? I prefer the unlikely option.

I head off in the third of my six gears and reach the nearside border of Stewton village at seventeen minutes past seven exactly. I reach the farside border about twenty seconds later. Village might be overdoing its significance. There are a couple of railway cottages and a barn called Railside Farm but no sign of train tracks. Thanks, Beeching. Grr.

The road sways alongside fields and hedgerows before briefly joining up with the Manby Road. This is the only stretch that involves traffic, but I only see two cars before I turn right into Furze Lane. I’m at the wrong end but it’s still eyes peeled time.  I think Gavin said the tree would be on my right as I head towards Legbourne so I fix my gaze on the hedge and start looking. I cycle slowly but see nothing save the regular mix of hawthorn, oak and sycamore. It’s a nice ride though, a cool evening with pale grey skies and only the faintest hint of a breeze. When there’s a break in the hedgerow, I take in the fields beyond and thank my lucky stars I’m in Lincolnshire.

I catch a glimpse of something in the road ahead. It could be a rabbit or stray pheasant, but it doesn’t stir as I approach. Whatever it is, it’s either injured or dead which means medical care or a dignified roadside burial. In the end it turns out to be a dry and cracked horse turd. I give it a wide berth and get back to looking at trees.

I’ve no helmet, which would infuriate my teenage niece, but nevertheless I decide to take a risk and glide across the road to be nearer the object side. I might be taking my life in my hands here, a thought underlined when a car gently pulls out of a building ahead and turns away from me, but faint heart never won fair maiden. I press on, paying little attention to the road and a lot to the undergrowth.

Sadly, I reach the end of Furze Lane without success. I ponder coming back another evening or maybe even walking it but, instead, I turn back on myself and unleash my good eye on the hedgerow. It’s verging on a forlorn hope though; the trees are a tangled wall and I can’t make out many species or even sometimes where one tree begins and another ends.

Think, you fool, think! If the apple fell out of a moving wagon (I’m wilfully ignoring the fact that it probably didn’t), where would it most likely be? The answer strikes me when I see it: a bend in the road. How had I missed the logic? I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been in buses careering around corners and turns, sending passengers and unsecured luggage flying hither and yon. That’ll be it.

I start paying closer attention to the bends, barely paying any heed to the road itself and the possibility of riding headlong into an advancing combine harvester.

My gamble pays off. On the outside of a vicious bend, hidden within a vanguard of Ash and Goat Willow, I spy the unmistakeable shape of some apples hanging from a branch. The tree is feral, crossed branches laden with infant fruit; no cultivated ornament this. The apples are in clumps of two and three, green with an occasional red blush and some ridges between stem and calyx.

It’s the ridges that cause me to shiver. An alarm is ringing in the back of my addled brain. Firing up the list of lost varieties I immediately download on any phone that comes into my possession, I find that there are only two ridged apples included. One of them is Peacock, but it has a conical shape that doesn’t seem to be a good fit for what I see before me. The second is Mrs Toogood, raised somewhere in the county in 1934 and lost by 1946. Mrs T. has a red blush (definitely present) and a flat shape (admittedly not so much). It’s too early to tell, but I could have stumbled upon the object of my seven-year obsession.

My pulse is hammering as I send a victorious snap through the ether to my sister’s phone.

“I found it,” I say.

If a text message can be non-committal, that’s what I get back. She’s not normally one of the smile and nod types, so I guess she must be distracted. I wish I had Gavin’s number on me. He’d see me right.

Regardless of the grammar-free smackdown, my enthusiasm is undimmed. Haters be damned. The druid was right. I’ve found his tree and it’s only a slightly knackering bike ride from home. I’ll visit regularly, build up a friendship based on respect and trust and, if I feel like she’s on board with the plan, snip a branch next spring for grafting. This is it. After seven long years, I might have found a lost variety. But probably not.