In 2010 a group of volunteers were invited to try and revive a neglected Victorian orchard. Now, after years of hard work, the trees are once again bearing fruit – and the spirit of collectivism that made it possible is being celebrated in song by the award-winning northern folk song and storytelling trio Harp & a Monkey.
Growing Together (The Orchard Song) is out now as a stand-alone digital single that was released on Friday.
Martin Purdy, Harp & a Monkey’s singer and principal storyteller, explained: “The song was commissioned as part of the Greater Manchester Town of Culture programme to celebrate the revival of the Holly Mount Orchard in Bury.
“On visiting the site it was clear just how much blood, sweat and tears had gone into transforming it. Anybody who doubts the power and joy of collectivism should visit this orchard, where local people are encouraged to share in the harvest. We left the project filled with optimism.”
The orchard was first planted in the early 1900s by a Roman Catholic order of Belgian nuns who had taken over a former orphanage and turned it into a convent school in 1889. When the last nuns left in 1992, the orchard had already fallen into disrepair.
In 2010, members of the gorilla gardening group Incredible Edible took on the challenge of clearing the near-acre site of fly-tipped rubbish, dumped asbestos and invasive species of plants.
A decade on and Holly Mount is now one of the largest and most successful community heritage orchards in the North of England, with a wide range of fruits. As part of the new song, some of the volunteers can be heard reciting the names of just a few of the varieties now harvested.
A spokesman said: “It’s sometimes hard to explain why we do what we do – our output is not counted in pounds, words or formulas. We come together, we work together, we grow together, and together we do our best to restore, conserve and show our community that we care for our environment. To come together is to be human.
“Thank you to Harp & a Monkey for doing the thing that arts, music and culture do so essentially – to explain how we are all human.”
An animation for Growing Together (The Orchard Song) has been created by the internationally acclaimed artist Simon J Jones for a Greater Manchester Town of Culture exhibition now running at Bury Museum and Art Gallery, Manchester, until February 2022. Jones, along with multi-instrumentalist Andy Smith, make-up the other two-thirds of Harp & a Monkey.
http://www.harpandamonkey.com/