Take Me To The Rivers ....

.... hospital said MrQ so off we three went. Ollie dog and I went for a walk in the ancient orchard while he was seeing the consultant.

The hospital is built on the site of the Rivers Nursery which was established in 1725 and the orchard that remains is about one percent of the original four hundred acres that the nursery comprised. Thanks to ceridwen I now know that Thomas Rivers (1798-1877) corresponded with Charles Darwin on botanical matters. My maternal and paternal grandparents were in the nursery business, as were my parents, I was brought up on a nursery. My parents-in-law were greengrocers and fruiterers and I married a nurseryman, so I felt quite at home in the orchard.  The wonderful names of the fruit that my forebears used to talk about were running through my head as we breathed in the cider-smelling air, windfalls crunched underfoot and the bloom of fallen gages shone in the grass. Some of the fruit I thought of were Beauty of Bath, Sturmer Pippin, Egremont Russet, James Grieve, Blenheim Orange and Laxton's Superb apples, Doyenne de Comice and Conference pears and Czar, Bullace and Early Rivers plums.