Drone shot of Diana’s Orchard site, 2023 (courtesy of Matt Turnbull)
We are delighted to be founding a young orchard on our prominent, south easterly field, encouraged by support from King Charles’ Coronation Community Orchard Fund.
As part of the ongoing regeneration of our 6 acres of former sheep grazing, we have designated this field as an open space where we’ll grow top fruit amidst a matrix of native bulbs and wildflowers. The orchard also masks a rather drab electricity substation which blights this corner of the pub land.
Orchards are not only about fruit production – they are beautiful in their own right, and are now recognised as contributing hugely to biodiversity, when managed sensitively. Already we have planted over 2000 native bulbs in the grass around the trees, and we will continue to diversify the area with wild flowers. In time, gorgeous blossom and fruit will grace the view for all, but for a few years the trees will be small, carefully protected by guards to ward off browsing animals.
The orchard has been designed by students of The Farmer’s Arms Gardening School working with tutor and Grizedale Arts’ Head Gardener Karen Guthrie. We are working with the local authorities on making a proposed permissive path through the field for walkers, helping them avoid the hazardous Spark Bridge road. Seating will soon welcome visitors to linger in the orchard, which will be open daily, year-round.
Pub regulars will be pleased to know that the orchard will also be the final resting place of our beloved pub cat Bailey, who sadly lost his life on the adjacent road in 2024.
We’ll hold regular events in the orchard (and they won’t all be about apples!) so keep an eye on our What’s On and social media for details.
How Did We Choose What To Plant?
Karen Guthrie is a self-confessed fruit nerd, and has developed two orchards at Lawson Park , some 6 miles from the pub, so many of the varieties chosen for The Farmer’s Arms are based on what has established well and thrived there. We have included a good number of tasty apples that can be eaten straight from the tree, as well as longer keeping varieties and some cookers, including the rare Hereford Beefing, originally bred hundreds of years ago for its cooking and drying qualities. The damsons (a sort of small, distinctly flavoured plum – for those who have not yet had the pleasure) were propagated from stock at Lawson Park, originally donated from drystone waller James Herd’s Cartmel Fell garden, and their local provenance will mean they are more likely to thrive. Cherry plums are a lovely native tree, easily grown, beautiful in early blossom and often with abundant small plums that often vanish to devouring birds.
Cobnuts are basically slightly larger hazelnuts, of which there are many wild ones in the area, and decent harvests can be expected as long as we can beat the squirrels to them.
Walnuts are a bit of a punt this far north, but climate change is shifting expectations of what fruits where, and besides, they make an excellent windbreak and in time an exceptional timber.
Apple Varieties:
Ashmead’s Kernel
*Bradley’s Beauty
Brownlee’s Russet
Cambusnethan Pippin
Grenadier
Hereford Beefing
Irish Peach
*Keswick Codlin
Red Gravenstein
Ribston Pippin
*Scotch Bridget
Sunset
Other Trees:
Cherry plum
*Westmorland damson
Cob nuts (varieties Butler, Cosford, Ennis, Kentish Cob)
Walnuts (varieties Buccaneer, Rita)
(*local heirloom variety)
Supported by the Coronation Community Orchard Fund, Kirkby Moor Wind Farm Community Benefit Fund & Friends of The Lake District. With thanks to South Lakes Orchard Group & The Farmer’s Arms Gardening School.
Who Was Diana?
The orchard is dedicated to the late Diana Rutherford, a beloved friend of The Farmer’s Arms. We met Diana when she joined the first Farmer’s Arms Gardening School at the end of the Covid19 pandemic. “Diana may not have been the youngest student in the school but she was the most dynamic, always trying new things, right up to the end of her life,” remembers tutor Karen Guthrie. ”She gardened in all weathers – like a true local needs to – and always had us in fits of laughter during lunch breaks with her totally unsentimental stories of the old days.”
An expert brass polisher and energetic volunteer, Diana gave much time and energy throughout the challenging early years of Grizedale Arts’ relaunch of the neglected inn, on top of her many other local environmental commitments. Returning to the locale in retirement after a successful teaching career, Diana inspired us to recapture the essence of the place she had adored as a child, when she had spent Christmases by the inn’s roaring fire, enjoying the company of family, friends and strangers alike. Her vision of The Farmer’s Arms as an inspirational place of hospitality and education is now our vision too.
Diana Rutherford at The Farmer’s Arms with her Community Hero Award, 2021 (photograph by Tom Philipson)
