March 2017
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Harvest time
Owl welcome
Q&A: Minnie Petersen
Page 7
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Page 19
Photo credit: City of Cape Town
Agricultural history re-emerges
This old apple orchard has re-emerged because of the receding water level of the Wemmershoek Dam
With the Wemmershoek Dam at its lowest level in many years the weathered stumps of a longsubmerged apple orchard have emerged above the water level. The management of the dam have kindly shared some photographs with the Tatler. The outline of the mountains in the old photograph can clearly be seen in the upper right corner of the contemporary photograph. It is believed that the apple trees in the photo are most likely ‘Wemmershoek’ apples – a variety that in 1927 accounted for more than a quarter of South Africa’s apple harvest. One of the few places the Wemmershoek apple can still be found is in the Tru-Cape Heritage Orchard at Oak Valley Estate in Grabouw. In somewhat of an
irony these trees are in fruit at the exact same time that the old stumps have been exposed. (Tru-Cape is the largest marketer of apples and pears from South Africa.) Buks Nel and Henk Griesel in their book ‘Apples in the Early Days at the Cape’ (2012) quote one IB Pole Evans as having said in 1909 that “the Wemmershoek apple is said to have arisen from seed grown on the farm Wemmershoek of the late Johannes Haumann of French Hoek in the Paarl district over a hundred years ago. The original tree, I understand, is still standing there today and is propagated by inlayers.” Who knows, perhaps one of the exposed stumps is that of the original Wemmershoek apple tree…
Left: Wemmershoek apples. Right: Water, age and the elements have weathered the old stumps.
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