Garrowby Orchard: The wildlife haven on the edge of a council estate

This Place, a column by Vicky Foster

Exploring Hull & East Yorkshire

To the west of the city, tucked away at the edge of a small council estate, there nestles a green haven: Garrowby Orchard.

There are a couple of ways to access it, but you can’t take your car, unless you’ve got prior permission, and someone has lifted the barrier for you.

Even if they’ve done that, you’ll only get a tiny bit closer than you would by parking on Brantingham Walk, like I did. It’s not easy to find, and that’s no bad thing, because part of the beauty of this place is that it feels a bit like a secret hideaway, like you’re slipping out of the everyday for a while.

Until five years ago there was nothing unusual about this space. It was an old school playing field. Hopscotch and chess boards are still marked out on a small tarmacked area that presumably used to be the playground.

But when the site was handed into the care of local residents, they began to do something quite extraordinary. They spoke with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, and under their guidance set about transforming a mundane bit of land into an oasis for both people and wildlife.

‘AN OASIS FOR PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE’: Garrowby Orchard

WM Jackson funded the planting of 3,000 trees in the winter of 2015/ 16, and when I visited this week, they were vibrant and bushy. So much so that if felt like you could be miles away, up on the Wolds somewhere, but for the odd glimpse of close-clustered, red-tiled roofs and the pale yellow bricks of the houses that stand metres away.

Traffic becomes a gentle, far-off hum. A passing train makes a sound like a sigh. Everything is filtered through a haze of green, and the sounds that dominate are the buzzing of bees, the chirping of crickets, the chirruping of birds.

This place has been home to a pair of nesting Greater Spotted Woodpecker over the spring. There are egrets, magpies, mallards, blue-tits, four species of bats. Deer and foxes are regular visitors.

Mayfly, damselfly, blue-green flashes of dragonfly buzz to and fro as we wander along the lightly mown in paths between the swaying purple and green grasses, thickets of thistles, cowslip, white clover flowers and meadow buttercups.

SPRING VISITOR: A Greater Spotted Woodpecker in Garrowby Orchard

Tender pink-tinged tips of hawthorn extend from tree guards that protect growing saplings. A sleek-stemmed rowan tree, still young and supple, offers up slim serrated leaves to the sunshine.

Bisecting the orchard is a stretch of dyke, part of a system that criss-crosses this area of the city.

It’s tame at this time of year, sitting placidly between tapering grassed banks, its surface strangled by weed and sprouting green reeds.

But during rainy autumns and winters, it stretches to cover much of the ground here, because the orchard is also a flood plain. Along with other key points in the area, it is a spot monitored by volunteer flood wardens.

Water bubbling up in the wrong place, high tides, changed flows, can all act as early warnings of impending watery trouble. And as we all know, Hull needs all the help it can get when it comes to flooding.

Back in the 70s, a resident tells me, it was commonplace for kids to bring their canoes here during particularly wet months. It’s always flooded at certain points in the year. But it’s hard to believe it today, seeing it sitting as a picturesque backdrop to wild roses and brambles.

We are passed only by a couple of dog walkers and some school kids as we wander, making our way to the strip of mature woodland that separates the orchard from stretching farmers’ fields at its far end.

It is peaceful. A huge willow drapes sheets of green foliage to mark the boundary. Thick nettles and dock leaves tangle in the shade, undisturbed.

But the area is well-used by residents. A quick scan of their Facebook page – Friends of Garrowby Orchard Community – shows that in the last two weeks they’ve had a plant identification walk and a bat-watching session.

They have a community picnic planned in July, and there have been regular gatherings since the land passed into their care.

The page is peppered with words like “lucky”, “kind”, “stunning”, and if you come here you’ll see why.

It’s not the kind of place every community gets to share, and they’ve worked hard to develop and maintain it. They’re rightly proud, and they tell me that during lockdowns it’s been “a haven - a little bit of escapism”.

There are pictures shared of the many varieties of plants, flowers, trees, birds, beetles, ladybirds, newts.

When we’ve enjoyed the peace awhile and they’ve shown it all off to me, we make our way back through the turnstile and leave.

Immediately the sense of the city starts to return. Hard tarmac replaces soft grass and earth underfoot. The sound of someone’s telly carries out of an open window. Grey roads. Metal hunks of cars. Lines of wheelie-bins denoting the civic structure of everyday life.

No wonder they love this place so much, I think.

It’s the antithesis of the everyday, with its wildness, the unpredictable paths of blue-bodied dragonflies and bees, the carefree flitting of cabbage-white butterflies and brown-winged moths.

I hope they get to keep it for a very long time.