In late July, both Molly and I spent about 5 days as artists in residence on site at Tom Adams’ Fruit Tree Nursery and the adjacent Templefields Agroforestry trial site that Molly and Olly are cultivating at Bronygarth. We also spent a bit of time helping out with some basic site tasks like weeding.
Tom’s is the principal business on Fruit Tree Nursery site, which also hosts Bloomin’ Ell, a cut flower business, The British Camomile Company, growing camomile for tea, The British Bee Company, which has a few dozen beehives, plus Bronygarth Orchard Garden, vegetable growers.
Besides growing and selling fruit trees, Tom also hosts training sessions on pruning and fruit tree cultivation and many different public engagement events to raise awareness of his work.
It is a beautiful, peaceful place, literally buzzing with insect and birdlife in Summer, yet with an orderly sense of industriousness, as various figures move quietly along the rows concentrating on their various tasks of tending to the plants and trees. At the time of our residency, Tom and 2-3 assistant workers were in the midst of a backbreaking activity to graft around 5,000 cherry, apple, pear, plum, damson, gage, quince and medlar trees – each one individually and carefully grafted and bound with tape.
Later, in the newly constructed timber office building, Tom talked to us in depth about the operation, its challenges and joys, and what the future might hold. You can listen to an edited soundscape of the interview with sounds of the site and field recordings of trees and soil on our Audio page.
The main thing that struck me during my time on site, was the intensity with which this patch of land was being used compared with surrounding fields of sheep grazing. This intensity comes at a cost of a huge amount of human labour. Tom works full time, and generally has assistant labourers on three days per week. It is relentless work in all weathers. There were several instances during the week which revealed Tom’s determination and passion for his work, but perhaps, more than anything, this is demonstrated by the sheer dedication to investing so much time and effort into this field over many years.
I am interested in the repetition and pattern of the labour: repeated movement/activity cycles, daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual cycles.
At both the Nursery and Templefields sites, I made several site sketch studies, recorded sounds of trees, soil and ambient sounds of birds and insects, and captured a few hundred photographs. For each residency site, I am creating folded booklets of surface rubbings in wax and ink as a record of my walks.
Using the photographs I created the first of a series of walk sequences – continuous photocollages for each site based on a field pattern design. There's a section of the sequence for Tom's Fruit Tree Nursery below in a slide gallery (click the side arrows to reveal more):
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