Just look at the wonderful shapes in this engraving, 'September - apple picking' by Clare Leighton in 1933. Nowadays the apple trees in the orchards here in Kent and Sussex (where she made her picture) are grown on dwarf stock so the pickers can reach the topmost fruit while standing on the ground. I'm sure they're glad that their work is so much easier, but what a loss to observers. What's happened to all the curvy ladders, I wonder? And the baskets? It's all giant crates now.
There's an equally beautiful Leighton, 'A lapful of windfalls' where women gather fallen fruit in their skirts and the swoop of the skirt is full of movement and purpose. It's the image on the cover of 'Four Hedges', Leighton's 1935 book about her garden in the Chilterns where she battles with terrible soil, envy of luscious valley gardens and capricious weather, and loves being in a place where they are creating a garden from nothing. It was reissued last year by Little Toller books, and I've just finished it as a bedtime book - no nightmares, no excitement, but consistent pleasure and quality writing, and fabulous pictures.
(You can order giclee prints of Clare Leighton's work from the Bookroom Art press
http://www.bookroomartpress.co.uk/store/product/148, which is where I found the print at the top of this entry.)
"What's happened to all the curvy ladders..." I remember using those curvy ladders in my youth . . . they were such a good idea, wide at the bottom narrower at the top, like a triangle
ReplyDeletewhich everyone knows is more stable than two paralell ladder sides.....I remember the feel
of those wooden rungs, the "thonk, thonk" sound when you climbed them. Most of the time
I have picked apples from the inside of the tree, climbing up inside on the limbs. There used to be a lot of apple trees around, in yards, in farmer's fields, as hedge rows . . .
now it's all corporate picking. The past was not necessarily better than the present,
but parts of it were more interesting and more fun . . .