Imagine a plant over ten times the height of even the tallest human, with a canopy whose wingspan covers the same measurement. Imagine that plant every year, or every other year, summoning the energy to produce over a ton of fruit. And imagine that plant having done so since before the invention of trains or planes or bicycles. Since before the Victorians or the French Revolution; this single plant worked and tended and harvested for three hundred years; functional, useful, productive. There’s nothing like a perry pear tree.
The size and longevity of a perry pear tree is, as far as I know, without any parallel in the world of drinks. Apple trees are doing well if they reach a century. Vines, ditto — and there are barely any out there of close to that age. Those that are are fiercely prized, protected and make wine that sells for eye-watering sums.
Yet for less than £10-£15 you can buy a 750ml bottle of perry from a triple-centurion perry pear tree in Austria, France, England and probably Germany. James Marsden at Gregg’s Pit in Much Marcle tends the eponymous Gregg’s Pit ‘mother tree’ – the original tree of that variety. Probably around three hundred years old, easily. At Hellen’s Manor nearby there are trees even older, planted to celebrate Queen Anne’s coronation at the very start of the eighteenth century. In Normandy’s Domfront AOC, the epicentre of French perry, I have stood next to trees of a similar age beside which I looked like an insect.
The idea of harvesting fruit from these giants, with their huge, elegant, cathedral-arch branches never fails to be mind-boggling. Yet that is what perrymakers in the world’s three surviving perry heartlands do, and have done for hundreds of years. David Nash in Herefordshire talks about picking pears from the same trees as his grandfather, Redvers, once did. Gabe Cook, the ciderologist, has spoken movingly about the generational family connection he felt picking Thorn pears on his grandmother’s farm, and how his first experience doing so crystallised in his mind the connection he felt to cider and perry more broadly, ultimately proving the touchpaper for a career of over fifteen years and counting.
“The size and longevity of a perry pear tree is, as far as I know, without any parallel in the world of drinks.”
Yet in the last seventy years, perry pear trees have been hacked down and torn out in every one of their ancient homelands, their fields planted over with corn or other crops or left as pasture for livestock. The mechanisation of agriculture and the continent-wide population shift from the countryside to the cities entirely overhauling a rural way of life and sounding a near-death knell for the drink in the process.
Once upon a time, trees like these covered vast swathes of Europe. Not only here in the UK, but right across central and western Europe. Trees whose fruit couldn’t be eaten — too tannic, too sharp, too astringent; which survived and were cultivated solely because of the drink they made and the central role that drink played in rural communities. Impossible as it is to imagine, there was a time in the 13th century when perry was a more important drink in Bavaria than beer. Within the last hundred years there were over a million trees in Austria’s Mostviertel region alone, more than one and a half million in Domfront, conceivably even more in Switzerland.
In Mostviertel, fewer than one in five of those million trees are still standing. In Domfront they’re down to fewer than one in fifteen. Switzerland, between 1950 and 1975 destroyed over 11 million fruit trees, including a vast number of the perry pear orchards that had made them, for hundreds of years, one of the world’s leading perry nations. In Germany and the UK the story is similar, but we don’t know the exact numbers because too few people seem interested enough to count.
Make no mistake: this is not only devastating to those of us who love perry; who know how remarkable and delicious this drink can be. It is a crushing blow to biodiversity and to ecological health. A perry pear orchard is one of the most naturally beneficial of agricultural systems. Think of the sheer volume of wildlife that can make their home in a single sixty foot by sixty foot tree, then extend that to a whole field of them, every tree harbouring birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals. As carbon capturers they are invaluable too; imagine the sheer weight of carbon that a tree of that size, that can live for over three hundred years, is able to sequester during its lifetime. Imagine the carbon damage done by losing so many million of them in such a short span.
That perry pear trees can live so long, grow so large, provide these marvellous, life-affirming benefits, should be reason enough for celebration and some measure of protected status. That they do so whilst simultaneously being working plants; perennials that fruit year upon year, that have a function, that make something, that can provide an income and support a business is nothing short of miraculous. Far from being hacked down in their hundreds, they should be championed as an astonishing natural resource; afforded protected status as a genuine national treasure, promoted and preserved.
I was recently lucky enough to sit with a group in the Dolly’s Meadow perry pear orchard at Ross-on-Wye Cider & Perry Company in Herefordshire’s Peterstow. It was during their cider festival and we had decided that the perry pear orchard would be a good place for a bottle share. They’re young trees by perry standards – planted by Mike Johnson and his father some thirty or so years ago – but fully productive now and, on a bright September afternoon, beaming with every hue and shape of fruit, from the ruddy burgundy of Aylton Red to vivid Yellow Huffcap, lumpen Hellens Early and round, green Bartestree Squash.
We drank perry in the heady, scented air and listened as we chattered to the occasional little rustle-thumps as a pear released itself from its branch and dropped through the leafy canopy to the orchard floor. I was struck, as I always am, by the privilege of being privy to this beautiful, secretive, little-known world. By this jewel in the crown of British drinks that flies so undeservedly under the radar; that we are so, so lucky to have, if only more of us knew it was there.
“Once upon a time, trees like these covered vast swathes of Europe. Not only here in the UK, but right across central and western Europe..”
When you drink a perry from the oldest trees you are connected by flavour to ten generations of orchardists, makers and drinkers. You have in your hand not only something delicious, but a living, tangible piece of natural and social history. To my mind, that is unbelievably special and probably unique. I hope, in another ten generations, that there will still be perry drinkers able to say the same.
The idea that all of this could vanish, so quickly, so insouciantly, is appalling. The knowledge of how close perry came to complete destruction, terrifying. Perry pear trees now only exist in significant numbers in three places in the world: the Three Counties and Monmouthshire in the UK, Domfront in France and Mostviertel in Austria, with pockets clinging on in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. They deserve respect, promotion and protected status. They should be considered in the same terms as a listed building, highlighted as national landmarks and preserved for both our ecological benefit and the future of perry.
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