There were two basic ways in which these orchardists saw their relationship with their orchard and these were signified by quite contrasting constructed landscapes. In the first landscape, the degree of care was demonstrated by how tidy the orchard looked, whereas for the second, care was demonstrated by the number of living things that were able to take refuge there. These orchards, however, were landscapes made through the particular way in which the orchardist thought of the agency of their orchard.
The visual feedback provided by the ‘look’ of an orchard gave feedback to an orchardist that their management practices were correct. Tidiness was equated with orchard health, as the following two quotes indicate: ‘I’d like to see the canopy…a pruned canopy…with nicely spaced canes…that certainly looks tidy…a good orchard looks healthy’ (Man, green). And, ‘I’ve got a vision that when it’s all up and running, that all the shelter’s nice and trimmed and it’s even…being tidy is important to me…as well as…performing. And that’s part of the health of the place, I believe’ (Man, green).
Creating a tidy orchard brings with it the implication of the need for control: ‘[It] became a giant mess with different weeds and stuff getting in there, but it’s reasonably tidy looking [now]…we keep it under control with the sheep’ (Man, organic).
Unless the orchard is controlled, it will become wild and out of control. It will become recalcitrant and not do what an orchard ‘should’ do, which is produce lots of fruit. As one green orchardist said, ‘There’s [sic] a lot of young five year olds in there, which still need a bit of training.’ Hence, I have called this a wild orchard because that is how the orchardist portrays its agency.
In this kind of orchard, the orchardists place an emphasis on production, making the land useful. This means that all available land is planted with kiwifruit vines, as this orchardist illustrates when he describes how they decided where to position their house: ‘we needed a house…so we sort of plonked this one here. We’ve been here ever since [laughs]. But no, that’s why we’re…in the orchard—there’s nowhere else you could put a house—unless we start cutting vines out and I didn’t really wanna do that’ (Man, green).
When I interviewed this man in his house and looked out the window, I found myself looking straight into the kiwifruit vines! For this next orchardist, by drawing on the knowledge he obtained from his experiences as a dairy farmer, he was able to totally reconstruct his orchard landscape by starting with a large amount of earth moving. As he explained to me while drawing a map of his orchard:
[I] did a lot of planning and drawing and whatnot from the dairy farm development work. This has all been contoured in here. That drain has actually been shifted…We brought it as close to the existing kiwifruit as we can. Eventually I’d like to tidy this area up and plant that out. No point in having that like it is. And some of the ground here we’ll extend the canopy a wee bit on this row just to make use of the available space and tidy it up. (Man, green)
For another orchardist, his orchard was ‘basically a wasteland’ (Man, green) until he came along and made it useful.
The desire that orchardists have to keep their land ‘neat and tidy’ is not restricted to New Zealand, though it has been documented for farmers rather than those working in the horticultural sector. Others have drawn attention to this in England (Burton 2004; Burgess et al. 2000; McEachern 1992), the central plains of the United States (Nassauer 1997), Austria (Schmitzberger et al. 2005) and Finland (Silvasti 2003). As Burgess et al. (2000:121) express it, rough land is ‘an anathema to farmers’ sense of their professional identity and expertise’.
Beyond their practical application, these views contain a moral dimension: it is ‘good’ for an orchard to be helped to produce the best fruit it can, hence plants need to be guided, controlled or manipulated to produce, to be made better—more useful, more domestic—by controlling the fertility and growth of the vines and keeping the weeds and pests away so that all the available resources from the soil and plant will go into fruit production. It is good that every bit of available land is used to produce as much as possible.
The wild orchard that has become tidy fits all the descriptions of a ‘good farmer’. The habitus of these orchardists is acted out on the orchard where a tidy, clean orchard signifies a good orchardist, the hard work that is needed to keep such a wild thing under control and in production and a person who cares about their orchard. Its tidiness, due to the weekly mowing and elimination of weeds, and its productivity are symbols that the orchardist is doing the ‘right thing’; ‘untamed and untended land represents decline and disarray’ (Silvasti 2003:146). Tidiness is also a reflection of attitudes towards the land imbued from the days of New Zealand’s colonisation, when land was broken in and control exercised over the ‘wildness’ (Egoz et al. 2001; Brooking 1996). It falls down, however, on one crucial point, which demonstrates how the moral economy approach enriches the understanding of orchards and orchardists. While paying attention to productivity, it is not necessarily the raison d’être for these orchardists. The reward they expect for attending to their orchard is a transition to a comfortable retirement lifestyle living alongside their orchard. As this process to a graduated retirement is worked through, often all an owner will do on their orchard is the mowing and weed control, hence these might be the only ways in which an orchardist can stamp their identity on the orchard. Regular mowing and weeding parallel the care that is taken of a garden. It is an example of an orchardist giving in to the ‘urge to garden’ (Brook 2003), creating a place where the orchardist feels ‘at home’. A tidy orchard looks like a well-manicured garden: ‘the economic as well as the aesthetic status of rural areas is generally predicated upon the exclusion of the wild’ (Thomas 1983). This orchard is a demonstration of solidity and reliability and careful stewardship for one’s future and of one’s investment. ‘This is a safe countryside where humanity nurtures and is, in return, nurtured by an accessible, appropriated and unthreateningly recognisable nature’ (Buller 2004:132).
The other kind of orchard is constructed by orchardists from their understanding of their orchards as needy—needing to be cared for, loved and nurtured—as the following quotes illustrate:
You can soon walk into an orchard and see if it looks stressed or anything like that…the colour of the leaves, the size of the leaves…same with any farm. You can work on a farm and soon tell whether it’s lacking something or hungry. You might not know what [it is]. [If] you consistently produce…big crops and don’t put the inputs in then eventually you’re gonna have a reserve system…that you’re gonna deplete. (Man, green)
Under the organic regime, we try and nurse the soil. (Man, organic)
Man: We do know that the high producing orchards are the ones that are run by the owners.
Woman: [A]nd they’re out there every day, pruning and titivating.
Man: Doing it for love. (Organic)
In fact, these orchards did not look needy. The orchardists owning needy orchards responded to their orchards by creating a haven for as many living things as they could as long as these things did not threaten the orchard.
I might mow here three times a year. I give the neighbour this side [a hard time]. He’s just got a new mower and it’s like a bowling green…got an hour to spare and he’s out killing the place. But to me, the longer grass—there’s [sic] creatures in it as well—bugs and birds and bits and pieces running round out there. (Man, organic)
[W]e could see there are advantages to the neighbours in that…we don’t have to worry about using aggressive chemicals near to where people live, and worry about what the wind is doing—that kind of thing…It’s an organic orchard alongside them…I actually feel happier walking around this place than I do some other orchards…[In the] HiCane[3] season the neighbours bring over their dog for walks…the neighbour on the other side quite often brings her horse for a walk and a bit of a chomp on the grass too…the neighbours have got 65 chooks [chickens]…which spend most of their time on our orchard. (Woman, organic)
This woman provided a refuge for her neighbour’s hens, which had a practical side:
We have taken some from [the] neighbour as well, ’cause once they go off the lay a bit he just chops their head off. But we’ll put them into the pension box over there…and we use the poo and I go down the orchard with a barrow load and just scatter it round the orchard—it’s a little bit of nutrient for the plants as well. (Woman, organic)
The orchard was regarded as a haven that was an escape from suburbia. For example, one orchardist (Man, organic) criticised his neighbour for building a metal driveway the full length of his orchard. He said, ‘That’s bad—it’s suburban…commercial industrialisation.’ For some, this attitude extended to creating a less industrial space by making the orchard look like a garden:
Woman: The orchard’s an extension of our garden…[at] the end of the rows and corners we’ve got various other shrubs and bits and pieces…just to make it look a bit sort of less clinical…it just breaks up the monocultures in there.
Man: And [it] keeps the bees in the [orchard all the time] and the bumble bees are lovely too—such gentle giants in the bee world and yeah—I haven’t been stung by one yet.
Woman: Bumble bees work in the rain. (Organic)
The way in which all the things in the orchard worked together was expressed often, as in the quotes above and in the following. There is an essence that such orchardists are working with nature rather than seeking to control it.
[In] October and November, the bees come in and do their bit. So in my case, four hectares, I have a million workers come on site and pollinate the crop. That’s critical to getting both [the] size of kiwifruit and the yield as well. So the weather at that time is really important, the bees only fly in the good weather. And then we move into three months of summer pruning intensive work again, which I find quite enjoyable. And because of the nature of the canopy that we’ve organised for our convenience the vines start leafing up as the summer weather comes on, and working under the vines in the summertime, I say it’s a large airconditioner, because the plants are transpiring moisture. Ah, they’re taking the latent heat away from the canopy and underneath the canopy is actually cooler—not just because it’s in the shade—but it’s actually the latent heat is being extracted by the vines so we work in a wonderfully comfortable environment. The height’s right—we don’t have to reach unduly or bend over—it’s designed at six feet and it’s a good working environment there for us, so when the hot sun is out we’ve got the umbrella up. (Man, organic)
Overall, however, the orchard is performing a much higher purpose: by creating such a haven, the orchardist has contributed to making the world a better place: ‘Oh it’s just, I guess, being very satisfied [that] what we’re doing is good for the world…and that we are not destroying the environment—we’re actually contributing to it’ (Man, organic).
The needy orchardist runs the risk of being called lazy by wild orchardists because for them tidiness implies hard work (Nassauer 1997; Burgess et al. 2000; Oresczyn and Land 2000; Egoz et al. 2001). Some ‘needy’ orchardists demonstrated an awareness of this risk by comparing themselves with wild orchardists. As Burton (2004:209) points out, however, ‘an untidy farm is not necessarily an unprofitable farm…Therefore, “untidy” farmers may not be lazy farmers from an economic perspective’. Needy orchards are also viable businesses.
Thus, all orchardists described here have constructed orchards that represent their response to the agency they have attributed to their orchard and the care that they are taking of it. This care, however, is indicated in two different ways, resulting in tidy orchards and orchards that are teeming with life.