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Most traditional orchards consisted only of grass between the fruit trees, which was grazed or cut for hay. But in many a range of soft fruit was also cultivated.
This was an ancient practise, although one which became more common in the commercial orchards of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Black currants and gooseberries were the main soft fruit grown, but in many early orchards these were accompanied by barberry, Berberis vulgaris, a native to the Middle East, and possibly to parts of eastern and central Europe, but an ancient introduction to the UK. William Lawson, in his New Orchard and Garden of 1618, described how an orchard should have ‘borders on every side hanging and droopy with Feberries [gooseberries], Rasberries, Barberries, Currans’; while Joseph Worlidge in 1675 simply stated that ‘The barberry is a common plant in orchards, and bears a fruit very useful in housewifery’.
Although John Parkinson in 1629 thought that the berries had ‘a sharpe sowre taste, fit to set their teeth on edge that eaten them’, barberries were widely used as an ingredient in both sweet and savoury dishes. As William Ellis observed in 1741, the ‘pretty red berries … are not only ornamental on the tree, but … after pickling, and being kept in glasses, are ready to be the same for gracing the sides of dishes of meat, and giving a pleasant tart taste to sauces, and to conserves’ . As late as 1848 an article in the Kentish Independent entitled ‘Garden operations for October’, included the instruction to ‘Gather ripe barberries, quinces and medlars, the former for preserving, the latter two for storing…’.The berries were widely recommended as an ingredient in sauce for chicken, goose, stewed lamb’s head, duck, pigeons, and plover, as well as for making barberry jam, barberry ice cream, barberry biscuits, and barbery wafers. The leaves could also be used, as a substitute for sorrel. In addition, barberry had a range of medicinal uses. Parkinson thus described how ‘The berries are preserved and conserved to give to sicke bodies, to help to coole any heate in the stomach or mouth, and quicken the appetite’. The berries, or the juice extracted from them, were considered particularly efficacious in reducing fevers (they could ‘represse the force of choller’), but they also had a range of other supposed benefits, including an ability to kill intestinal worms.
Barberry was not only planted in gardens and orchards. From the seventeenth century, some writers advocated its use as an agricultural hedging plant, although usually in combination with hawthorn, and mainly to fix gaps in existing hedges. The Dictionarum Rusticum, Urbanicum and Botanicum of 1712 suggested that barberry ‘might be now and then inserted among our hedges’; The Farmer’s Magazine in 1802 described barberry as ‘so useful a plant in filling up gaps in thorn hedges, and even in making a tolerable fence where thorns will hardly thrive’.
Originally a plant of orchards, and gardens; latterly used as a hedging plant; barberry gradually spread into the wider countryside. The botanist Robert Turner described in 1664 how barberry ‘groweth plentifully in Gardens, Orchards, and Closes near dwelling houses, where it hath been planted; it hathe been also found wilde in hedgerows, but I believe some Ditcher planted it there to mend his hedges instead of Thorns’. A century or so later it had become locally common, and in 1778 Mawe and Abercrombie suggested that it grew ‘wild in many of our woods and hedges…’. In 1883 it was recorded, as a wild plant, in every English county except Cumberland, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. Yet now it is rare.
Farmers soon suspected that it was a source of mildew, or rust, in wheat, and began to grub it out whenever they found it. In his Timber Trees Improved of 1741 William Ellis, an agricultural writer who farmed at Great Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, reported that barberry:
Has an ill name in this country for attracting Blights to the corn that grows near it; insomuch, that an ignorant, malicious, farmer of Gaddesden, about the year 1720, conceived such a hatred against a large one, that grew in his neighbours ground, very near his, that, for this very reason, he poured several pails of scalding water on its roots, in the night-season, at different times, ‘till he killed it. Were there, indeed, many trees that stood close together, its possible that they might contribute to such a misfortune; but, in my humble opinion, one can be of no effect; however, most of our Countrymen affirm its damage
His scepticism was widely shared by educated opinion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with writer after writer pouring scorn on the ‘foolish superstition’. Farmers took no notice, gave up planting it and killed it wherever it was found. And eventually they were proved right. By the end of the nineteenth century scientists at home and abroad had established that barberry did indeed play a vital role in role of barberry in the complex life-cycle of Puccinia, the fungus responsible for rust – a disease which is again on the increase, with a dangerous new strain (UG99) currently threatening world food security.
I have never seen barberry still growing in any orchard in eastern England. Does anyone know of examples?
Tom Williamson
September 2019