My train trip to London goes through a tunnel under the South Downs into a region of rolling countryside between the North and South Downs. A couple of stops later we are in Haslemere (famously, possibly, it was the home of Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate for much of Queen Victoria's reign, "The Lady of Shallot", and "Crossing the Bar" being two of my favorites. Don't look to me for highbrow literary review...)
Diversion there, Haslemere is a lovely place but situated in a dingy cold 'hollow' (and completely without mobile phone signal it seems). It is not unusual through the winter for Haslemere to be shrouded for days in drifting mists, and glinting with layers of hoar frost, or thickly blanketed with snow long after it has melted everywhere else.
It is a lot less usual to encounter autumnal style mists cloaking the country side, muting the colours and muffling the sounds in the first week of August, but there they were - Petersfield to Guildford - thicker in the hollows, falling gently off the trees, turning the scenery a palest shade of grey, condensing on the windows until they eventually streamed... silver trails of water flying away.
I wonder what sort of autumn we will be having then.
And on the subject of mellow fruitfulness (well it was in there somewhere), the blackberry season has been, and continues to be, phenomenal. I have been eating them on my porridge and in my puddings, giving bucketsful to a neighbour, filled several 4 litre buckets for freezing and am running out of freezer space. How many blackberries does one household need? Good question. It's free food and berries are, to me, always luxury food so I can't seem to walk past the vast quantities ripening on wild vines that line our lanes, allotments, hedgerows and walking paths, and threatening to drop to earth untouched by human or wildlife.
Why, my sister asked when visiting last week, do we not see people out with buckets availing themselves of this abundance? Another good question. I have no idea why not. Does anyone else?
We used to pick the blackberries near our home and I’d make jam from them
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately as more city people moved in they began spraying them to kill them off. They’re weeds here. But I found them to be productive weeds and didn’t mind them at all
Blackberries can quickly get out of control as we experienced when our elderly neighbour stopped maintaining her garden. The new people next door have struggled with it for about a year and we are still digging up blackberries in our lawn and flower beds too. When an area starts to get built up I guess there is less room for unruly plants. (Especially ones with nasty prickles.)
DeleteMy mother could be relied on every year to recite "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness". But not this early.
ReplyDeleteCheers, Gail.
That made me go and look up the whole poem.... it is sort of about dying isn't it? Keats died of TB about 18 months after he wrote is at the young age of about 26.
DeleteThe lanes around our old house were always bursting with blackberries. We would see cars parked along the lanes early in the morning and people filling their buckets and bowls before anyone else got there.
ReplyDeleteI don't eat them as I had a traumatic experience as a child with a half eaten blackberry and little white wriggly grubs. Yuck.
The little white wriggly grubs only taste like blackberry you know. Bonus protein.
DeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteI recall in childhood, it was imperative that all we kids foraged the hedgerows for these and raspberries and blaeberries. Nothing that nature provided was ignored. I rarely see folk doing this these days. As to why? No idea really; maybe too much like hard work? Buying jam is cheaper than the sugar and power required to produce some? Fear of contamination? One of life's wee peculiarities. YAM xx
Your words are so poetic, definitely guided by a Greek muse. I can imagine being on the train and peering out.
ReplyDeleteHaven't tasted a blackberry on years. I can imagine their taste too
They are soooo very very good.
Deletefor five years of my life, age 10 to 15, we lived In Kentucky and each year we did what you are doing, picking wild blackberries. we ate them until we popped and mother canned them in various jams, jellies stashing the jars for the year. i have not seen any wild here, but would pick them if i did. I am wondering if some of the younger people don't know they are edible, no one to show them or tell them. or maybe just to lazy with the ease of life these day. food was short in our lives and all things edible were picked and eaten or canned
ReplyDeleteWhat we identify as food changes with each generation. I wonder if we are reaching a stage where it is only 'food' if it comes from a supermarket, highly processed and packaged in plastic? (That is certainly the case with Mr B who was brought up on packaged food and will only eat highly processed 'industrial waste' if left entirely to his own devices.)
DeleteLovely, evocative writing and how refreshing that you are looking out of the window rather than being quite oblivious, as so many people seem to be.
ReplyDeleteNot so many blackberries round here but the woods will be full soon of people gathering chestnuts.
Well at least the chestnuts aren't going to waste. I have seen a lot of cob nuts wasting on recent bike rides but I guess seeing them on roads means that squirrels have already foraged them.
DeleteI don't know why people don't pick such wild food. Maybe they're not knowledgeable about what's safe, and avoid them all. My citybred neighbors were astonished when I told then how many of the "weeds" on their patio were edible -- purslane, shepherd's purse, hairy bittercress, sorrel. They were horrified at the idea of eating them, even though they were unsprayed. There was a social element at work, too, they feeling it was shameful to forage.
ReplyDeleteThat is an interesting observation - shameful - but I do see how it might work that way. Strangely there would once have been a strong social element in going blackberry picking together. (I love purslane and sorrel, not tried the others.) I feel a post or two coming on about how we gather our food these days, and what we therefore identify as food and how we pass that on to the next and future generations.
DeleteWhat? Nothing at all? Mind you that shouldn't surprise me - NZ (before the arrival of humans and their food) had one of the most impoverished natural environments in the world. There is very little native plant material that is digestible by humans, and it certainly won't keep you alive if you get lost in the bush. Aus might be the same, although your humans arrived a heck of a lot earlier and developed some very novel ways of extracting food sources and water from the landscape there.
ReplyDelete