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Market Gardening in the Tamar Valley Image Library
A Fruity Summer Run
Prestigious Award for Tamar Valley AONB’s first publication
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A Fruity Summer Run
Location: Cornwall
May 2004
Tamar Valley locals celebrated the launch of a new book by donning Victorian outfits and sending punnets of strawberies by train to London's Covent Garden.
Why the fruity passengers? 140 years ago their forebears did the same run to London and began a summer tradition for getting the earliest strawberry crop to market.
‘Sovereigns, Madams and Double Whites,’ a book plus CD, celebrates the fruit and flower pioneers of the Tamar Valley. It draws on historic records, local memories, old pictures and new photography compiled by Ted Giffords as part of their LHI project .
Joanna Lewis, the book’s editor, explains: “Market gardening was a central part of Tamar Valley life for more than 100 years and there are still many people who remember it at its last peak in the 1950s when up to 10,000 people were employed each summer to pick and pack flowers, fruit and vegetables.
“The large plantations have mostly all gone now - wiped out by changes in agriculture and imports. But by going back to the archives and old photo albums, talking to older residents, and listening to present day growers we’ve created a fascinating account of what it was once like here, and the aspects of it that were special to Tamar, including retrieving some unique punnets and tools”.
Tamar’s fame as a source of early strawberries came about by chance when James Walter Lawry, a local grower, then aged 22, called at the Covent Garden fruit market after a sightseeing visit to Crystal Palace.
James was staggered to find only ‘forced’ strawberries on sale, and at a half-crown per punnet - five times the price obtainable in Devon/Cornwall. The traders were equally surprised to hear that Tamar’s strawberry season was almost over and they sent Lawry home with a contract to supply London with early strawberries from then on.
The contract revolutionised valley life; previously, most families had depended on copper mining but by the mid 1860s the mines were all but exhausted, throwing hundreds of people out of work. Lawry’s discovery prompted a widespread shift to strawberry growing and, later, the production of other fruits, narcissi and daffodils, as well as allied trades, such as tool and punnet-making and fern cutting, to line fruit and flower containers.
SOVEREIGNS, MADAMS and DOUBLE WHITES: Fruit and Flower pioneers of the Tamar Valley, with text by Joanna Lewis, and photography by Ted Giffords, on sale in bookshops throughout Devon/Cornwall, or you can download an order form at www.tamarvalley.org.uk. Priced £18.99.
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