Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Orchard Close ·
Why the Orchard Gate Is Painted Green
Every six years someone repaints the gate at Orchard Close green, and the village insists the paint must never be mixed a shade lighter, or the apples will stop coming back in the morning.
- status: rumor
The gate at the bottom of Orchard Close is painted green. It has been painted green for as long as anyone in the village can remember, and the paint is always the same shade, a dark, slightly yellow green that the paint merchants in the town have stopped stocking because nobody else buys it. When the gate needs repainting, which is every six years or so, the job goes to whichever family has the oldest claim to the orchard, and they buy the tin from the same shop in the square and mix it themselves in a bucket with a wooden spoon.
The rumour is that the paint must never be lightened. Not by a drop. If the green is too pale, the story goes, the apples will not come back.
Nobody in the village will say exactly what they mean by come back. The orchard lies on the south side of the lane, a row of old trees behind a dry-stone wall, and its fruit is picked and sold in the autumn. But there is a custom, which the younger people half-believe and the older people wholly do, that the apples are not all picked. A few are left on the grass beside the gate on the last night of the harvest, for whoever wants them. In the morning they are gone, and the trees, which were bare, have fruited again.
Edwin Tallis, who was the orchard's keeper in the 1930s, is said to have painted the gate a lighter green one summer to match a new fence on the lane. He was a practical man and did not hold with what he called the old wives' tales. That autumn, the trees produced a full crop, and he sold it all. But the following year, when the harvest had ended, he went out to leave the usual few apples by the gate, and found the gate itself gone. Not removed. Simply not there, the hinges still set in the stone, the bolts still in the posts, and beyond it, in the orchard, a single apple tree that had not been there before, heavy with fruit, and a little way off, a path worn into the grass that led toward the village.
Tallis did not come back to the orchard for a month. When he did, the gate was in place, painted the old dark yellow-green, and the apples had come back to the trees. He never painted anything lighter again.
Some villagers say the gate is a boundary, and that the green marks where the orchard ends and the other world begins. Others say the apples are a payment, and that the green is the colour of a debt that has been settled. The children call it the Apple Gate and dare each other to lick the paint, which they never do.
This story is told at harvest suppers by Jean Tallis, granddaughter of the keeper, who says her grandfather never once mixed the paint himself, and that she only ever buys it from the shop in the square, and that she has never once been able to say why she will not let anyone else do it.