Do you remember February? February seems so long ago now. Days seem to have been been so much more simple back then when we experienced Storm Ciara. This storm broke my eating apple tree in half.
Even further back to 2007 when I moved to this house and the garden was the blankest of blank canvases the eating apple tree was multi-stemmed and growing well. One of my early tasks was to remove the sideways stem as it would only have fallen at some point anyway. Time passed and the tree was tidied a few more times but continued to grow well despite starting to show its age. I am not an eater of raw apples but I am told that the apples it produced were nice and it generally produced a good crop every alternate year. I do not know what variety it is and it is clearly quite an old tree possibly planted when the house was built around 90 years ago. I have done a few searches and I think it might be something like Barnack Cross. One day I will take one of the apples to be identified. Whoever it is, it is a good tree.
Storm Ciara took hold of the tree and snapped it into two. I tidied up the stump leaving it about 4 feet tall in the fond but uncertain hope that it might start to regrow.
I kept an eye on it and nothing happened. I shrugged my shoulders and did not mind too much, I thought that the decaying trunk would be good for wildlife anyway and it was still propping up the Wild Edric Rose and the Clematis cirrhosa, one of my very favourite clematis and winter flowering plants.
Then one day, midsummer, there I was mowing the lawns and getting quite close to the base of the tree and...
there at the base of the tree was some fresh green foliage.
This was exciting, this was very exciting. How it had it started to grow and I had not even noticed?
After a while the tree was sprouting really quite well. The longest shoot I have tied in so that it grows upwards. I tell myself this could form a main stem again for the tree.
I am now very excited to see what will happen in the Spring. Will I get blossom? Will I get apples?