Community orchards exist in the UK, in Boston, in Philadelphia and in Vancouver. But I thought they were new to Toronto. Not so, I discovered, when talking to a local resident Harold Freeman who grew up in the neighborhood 60 years ago and remembers playing in the fruit trees as a young boy.

This was a different kind of community orchard. It was an orchard planted in the early 1900s and later abandoned. The community shared the produce with interested residents harvesting the trees and using the fruit. As that abandoned orchard was parceled off and sold to developers building new homes here in the 1940s, the fruit trees were part of the deal and so the new houses were built with these mature fruit trees in their front or back yards.

As an adult, Harold returned to Cedarvale to buy one of these homes. And his new house, like many others in the neighborhood, had a yard filled with fruit trees. Since then the two apricots, a pear and a plum tree in his yard have died of old age. But Harold still has a beautiful apple tree in his backyard which I visited recently (top photo) It’s the biggest apple tree I’ve ever seen. It’s multistemmed. And at the ripe old age of 80 to 100 years old, it still looks beautifully healthy.

Harold’s neighbor Eileen has four fruit trees in her yard as well. “The pears are delicious!” she says. (Eileen is on the far right in the bottom photo)

I’m hoping to return in the fall to taste them first hand!

Apple Tree from the Historic Orchard in Cedarvale

Four more old fruit trees, possibly from the historic Cedarvale orchard