Your Community Needs You: tap into local flavours

Few would deny that the threads connecting food to community have been under increasing strain for the past two generations. But something has happened: there’s now a real sense of curiosity and determination, a groundswell of concern and support for local food and regional producers. Whatever your community food focus, you can be sure of having a lot of fun and uniting people with a common cause...

Read more about championing local food in the June 2011 issue of Country Living.

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We have put together a factsheet about championing local produce. To download the factsheet, click on 'Click here to download' at the bottom of the page.

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If a tart can bring fame and tourists to the medieval Peak District market town of Bakewell, surely a rare red- and gold-flecked plum can do the same for the medieval north Wales market town of Denbigh? That’s the speculation of Ian Sturrock, fruit grower, and the dream of Sue Muse, local business and community entrepreneur.

He is an organic nurseryman, dedicated to seeking out indigenous Welsh fruit varieties. She is a long-time Denbigh resident and high street café proprietor who wants to restore the pride, ambition and prosperity that made her town the 17th-century capital of north Wales. The Denbigh Plum Festival is just her latest idea, but it may turn out to be a really big one.

Sue accidentally rediscovered the Denbigh plum in the summer of 2009. She’d been working with the Denbigh Business Group and the council to come up with a good idea for a festival. Sitting in a colleague’s back garden one afternoon, Sue remarked on a beautiful old tree there. It was a Denbigh Plum. “I’d never come across it,” she says, despite being a local for 16 years. “Very few had.” She tracked down one of those who might have: Ian Sturrock, who had heard of it long ago. “It wasn’t in any of the reference books, though. Then, one day, about five years ago, a local doctor rang me up, saying his dad was the expert of all things Denbigh plum in the 1930s. That was the first real evidence I had.”

The doctor gave Ian some wood from an old tree, which he used to create new trees, grafted onto modern rootstock. They were the first new Denbigh plums in a century. Once Sue started putting the word out, locals began to identify their own trees.

Although it’s a rare variety – and the only surviving Welsh plum – she found quite a few of the big old trees in the area, still producing a great harvest. With a bit of detective work, Sue reckoned she could beg, forage and steal enough plums to put on a festival.

For the first event, on Halloween 2009, the town went plum-crazy. All the shops had purple plummy window displays, school children composed plum-themed poetry and a local band, the Denbigh Stones, played the festival gig. Cannily, Sue and the business group decided to involve various retailers in making plum products, so they had jam, chutney, cake, hot bread, wine, gin and even plum sauce to go with the hog roast that the local butcher was serving up.

The town embraced its native plum eagerly and wanted more. So Sue hunted down a plot of land and raised enough money for a community orchard, pond, picnic and play area. At last year’s festival, people could sponsor their own tree and Ian Sturrock came to help with the mass planting of 60 fruit trees: 25 Denbigh plums plus indigenous pears and apples, including the extremely rare Bardsey apple, which Ian has been growing since he discovered the sole remaining tree on Bardsey Island, off the coast of north Wales, in 1999.

Sue says: “We’re now looking at building a hut and education unit down at the orchard. We’ve had amazing support.” They have indeed; the local Co-op has brought the Denbigh plum right back to the heart of the town by planting two trees behind the shop. Ian cannot produce new trees fast enough to satisfy the interest.

Now Sue Muse is planning the third festival and she’s put the whole of her beloved town on alert to donate plums. She says with a laugh, “I need an awful lot for what we have planned.” Find out for yourself on 29 October in Denbigh, north Wales (www.visitdenbigh.co.uk and www.iansturrockandsons.co.uk

The Prince's Countryside Fund is Country Living magazine's charity of the year and will be supporting its work at the CL Fairs and in the magazine. It's funded by businesses that have a connection to the countryside, through the products they make or sell. You can donate through your post office. Visit www.princescountrysidefund.org.uk.

Click here to find out more about Country Living magazine's Your Countryside Needs You! campaign

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