A DAY AT GRASMERE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 76, 11 March 1933, Page 8

A DAY AT GRASMERE

FAMOUS ORCHARD'S BEAUTIES

PIONEER'S CREAT WORK

A FLACE OF INSPIRATION

Grasmere orchard in St. George's road is named alter an English Lake District village where William Wordsworth’s grave lies, and if you reinember that fact when you visit it, you will be at once struck by the singular appropriateness lying behind the clioice o' a name for this enchanting beauty ■pot. Though it is a commercial orchard, it is commercial in a most genteel way, and does not thrust before you the mercenary reason lor its existence Its money-making trees •nd vines lie almost completely hidden behind an unending screen of delightful gardens and vistas of Howers •nd hedges, and do their blossoming •nd their fruiting quite unostentatiously. It is a place where Wordsworth would surely have been well content to live, and where he would have found •n almost unending inspiration for his marvellous poetry. Perhaps it would •ver. have saved him from some of his •mazing and unaccountable anticlimaxes, or at least from his famous “Spade! With which Wilkinson hath tilled the ground.” Yesterday the Hastings Rotary Club nembers, together with their wives, wero the guests of Mr Ralph Paynter, the manager, and Mrs Paynter, and •pent a most happy time at lunch under the orchard trees. One of the things that must have struck many of the visitors was the fact that so completely rural a scene could exist so near to a town. Its rusticity does not consist merely in quietness and remoteness, but m those indefinable but •Iways quite distinctive circumstances that so clearly and unmistakably divide the rural from the urban. Perhaps a great part of its charm lies in its age, •nd in a touch of that mellowness only to be found in its fullest beauty in countries much older than our own. It is indeed a place of the rarest beauty and charm, and yet its existence is largely unknown even by the peoplo who live only a mile or two from it. Perhaps it is all the more beautiful for that.

Grasmere has an area of 83 acres, Mr Paynter explained to his guests, and was originally owned by the late Mr E. H. Williams Its present owner la Mr A. B. Williams, of Puketiti. Fifty-five acres of the property is in fruit trees, about eight acres in walnuts (which have borne a crop of •bout seven tons), and a part in grass and lucerne. Mr Paynter took over the management of the property in 1920, and since then its production has gone up enormously; “owing,” Mr Paynter modestly explained, “to the ageing of the trees.” The orchard carries one of the largest crops of Winter Nelis pears m New Zealand, and the aiea planted in that variety amounts to twenty acres from which, Mr Paynter hopes, 20,000 bushels will be taken annually when the trees reach full bearing. That •mount is the equivalent 'of nearly 400 tons of fruit. It was a wonderful effort that Mr Williams had put forth ui establishing the orchard, said Mr Paynter, and none could help but admire it.

The Rotarian guests enjoyed them•elves thoroughly, and were treated witn a measure of hospitality fully in •ccord with the country tradition. Among the fruits that were put out for the pleasure of the guests was a new apple raised by Mr Kidd, a Wairarapa orchardist, and given the name of Kidd's Orange Red. It is a cross between a Delicious and a Cox’s Orange, and was evolved, said Mr Paynter, only after a great deal of trouble and difficulty. It was an apple of fine flavour (a statement which was amply verified by the visitors), and would be a great success and a credit t<> the man who evolved it. One of its chief virtues was that it matured in the more or less unfruitful period between the ripening of the Cox's Orange and the ripening of the Delicious. and thus would be a most valuable export variety