The Cherry Tree

The Cherry Tree was first published in 1932 and is the final volume in Adrian Bell's classic rural trilogy. The first two volumes are Corduroy and Silver Ley. In The Cherry Tree the author describes further farming experiences, his marriage, and becoming habituated to country life. Taken together these three volumes have been described 'as the classic account of a twentieth-century Englishman's conversion to rural life'.

Adrian Bell (1901-1980) was born in Lancashire, grew up in London, and was educated at Uppingham School which he hated. His father, news editor of the Observer, was a republican and a socialist and had no truck with university education. His son was to do something useful; in 1920 he went to East Anglia to work as a farm apprentice. He subsequently became a farmer himself. These experiences provide the material for his famous rural trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree. In total he wrote over twenty-five books, he also set the first Times in 1930 and continued to devise crosswords for the paper for the next thirty years.