Deachman: Lansdowne Park’s apple orchard is a gem hiding in plain sight

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When Lansdowne Park’s modern-day redevelopment was underway just over a decade ago, the so-called heritage apple orchard was pretty low on my list of the project’s laudable features.

Or even its un-laudable ones. In the near-endless catalogue of the pieces that made up Lansdowne’s puzzle, including the new south-side stands, Great Lawn, playground, public art, outdoor rink/basketball courts, condominiums, lack of shade/public washrooms and the relocation and refurbishment of the Horticulture Building, the orchard scarcely registered on my radar.

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After all, three dozen scrawny trees on what amounted to little more than a postage stamp-size traffic island was hardly what I’d call an orchard, even if it did fit Merriam Webster’s definition of “a planting of fruit trees, nut trees, or sugar maples.” Does that mean even two trees comprise an orchard? Frankly, it seemed a bit of an oversell, like a real-estate listing describing a broom closet as an office. And in the grand scheme of Lansdowne, there were simply too many other bits worthier of condemnation and/or commendation than this, ahem, orchard.

Now, 10 years later, there it is: this little orchard of three dozen (37, actually) apple trees on a postage stamp-size traffic circle. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know it was there; It took a colleague of mine to mention it to me recently before I recalled it. That’s how little attention I’d given it these past years.

So I visited it last week, taking along a ladder and small basket, on the off-chance there was anything there worth taking home.

And I confess, it was a glorious (and, yes, small) oasis. Despite my late-season arrival, the trees were fairly laden with apples that were still firm and tart. True, the largest and best-looking among them appeared to be on branches beyond my reach, but perhaps, I figured, that was simply a real-life example of the grass-looking-greener-on-the-other-side-of-the-fence idiom.

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The lower branches, meanwhile, while more sparsely populated with fruit, still bore more than enough for any number of pies I might want to bake (that number being one). Few lay on the ground, a hint that I was hardly the first to discover this bounty on city (aka our) property.

And indeed, in the short while that I was there, other visitors availed themselves of the orchard’s offerings, including three young teenagers who, presumably enjoying the freedom of a PD day, each grabbed an apple or two to eat. Nearby, some adults sat at the orchard’s picnic tables, helping themselves to the shade the trees provided. And high above, seven-year-old Oak Casey channelled her inner spider monkey, retrieving, and — thank you, Oak — sharing some of those elusive upper-tier apples.

Oak’s father, Paul, who stood below to catch the apples that Oak dropped, said they’ve been harvesting apples at Lansdowne for a few years now.

“We come every September. My mom has made pies with some of the apples, and we just cook the other ones down and make some apple butter and desserts and get the house smelling good.

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“This is like a little downtown secret that no one knows about,” he added. “It’s nice that this is right in town and you can just come and grab a few apples. We sometimes go to the bigger orchards outside the city, but we don’t need to; we can get a good haul here.”

It was while chatting with Paul and Oak that I came to see the orchard as something more than simply a place to grab an apple or sit for a spell. It serves as a tiny community hub, drawing people to it and providing an easy topic of conversation for them to engage with one another, not unlike the weather. “How about them apples?” is a pretty non-threatening opener.

Lansdowne’s orchard, it turns out, also benefits those who don’t visit. Hidden Harvest Ottawa is a program whose volunteers harvest fruit from trees on public and, with permission, private property in Ottawa, with most of the collected crops donated to food banks, shelters, school food programs and other groups that address food insecurity in Ottawa.

According to Brodie Kinnear, project lead with not-for-profit EnviroCentre, which operates the program, their volunteers have been harvesting at Lansdowne at least as far back as 2016.

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“It’s beautiful, high-quality fruit,” she says.

This year, with the city’s cooperation, they conducted three harvests at Lansdowne, netting about 2,500 pounds of apples. Apart from the above-listed groups who were beneficiaries, so, too, were visitors to Just Food Community Farm, in Blackburn Hamlet, who last Sunday were treated to free samples of apple cider pressed from Lansdowne’s apples.

A few days after harvesting my few pounds of apples, I returned to the orchard to share the apple pie I’d made, and some ice cream, with Oak and Paul, and Paul’s wife, Karen, and their son, Fitz. They brought an apple crisp that Karen baked, still warm from the oven. We spent an enjoyable hour together, then headed our separate ways.

So a decade after I first began to ignore it, I’d like to correct that oversight. Lansdowne’s orchard is a wee gem that has shot up the list of my favourite things at the park.

It comforts me. It comforts me with apples.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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