The Boxley Ground

The Boxley Ground is an orchard in the Medway country outside Maidstone, held by the family of Orchard-Master Simon Teynham for three lives. As is the custom in Kent, where orchards go by the name of the man or the place that first set them, it is still called the Boxley ground long after the planting, and the county thinks of it as Teynham ground all the same.

Teynham's grandfather planted it and never ate a decent crop from it. An apple tree comes into bearing only in its seventh year, gives little for a few years more, and then crops steadily for half a century. Teynham himself has eaten forty harvests off it, and he likes to say that the sum explains both why the trade is worth having and why so few newcomers ever enter it. He intends his grandson to have forty more.

The orchard lives in fear of the same few things as every orchard in the county: a May frost in the blossom's second week that strips the trees and with it the year, hail, canker, and the run of thin crops that drives a grower to borrow against his trees. In blossom week the larger Medway houses pay hired parties to sit out in their orchards at night, and the Teynhams are not known to be an exception, though nobody will say what is being watched for.

Teynham is a justice at quarter sessions and a reluctant one to convict, yet the valley reckons that nothing save a frost, or someone who stood between his orchard and a frosty night, could ever make him a lawbreaker. His cousin Barnabas, the placing agent at Maidstone, grafts forty kinds of apple from cuttings taken at the Boxley ground.