It is hard to make progress on a walk around our country roads these days when every few steps you just have to stop and pick another handful of fat, juicy blackberries. And if you are not gorging on these plump hedge-fruits then your eyes and your attention will surely be drawn to some other vibrant gem peeping from the rusting foliage of the bushes.
The blackberries are beginning to ripen
It is Autumn all of a sudden. Yesterday we got up to a balmy 26 C here in Galway, but today we are told to expect nothing higher than 15 C, and maybe a plunge down to 2 C tonight. So the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is upon us.
Autumn might just be my favourite season. It’s not that I am glad to see Summer end, but instead I am continually surprised and delighted in the gifts that Autumn brings. A kind of consolation you might say for robbing us of our long lovely sunshiny days.
So we have colour, and crunch underfoot as we walk, and we have a bounty of fruits laid on for us by the hedges. We have small scarlet haws from the hawthorn, orange-red hips from the wild rose, ink-black sloes from the blackthorn, and masses of fat blackberries oozing with purple juice from the otherwise mean and nasty briar.
The hedges glow with bright scarlet haws
I am ashamed to say all this bounty is wasted on us country folk nowadays and every year much of it hangs rotten on the bushes and eventually falls to the ground, unappreciated and uneaten; except for those that the birds are able to eat before they rot. Haws will last for a long time into Winter and do sustain a large number of birds, and I would guess that they also gobble up the rose hips. I am not so sure about the sloes – hard and bitter little lads that they are!
Orange red hips adorn an Autumn hedge
Most years I collect handfuls of blackberries and eat them on my walks, and sometimes I do make an effort to at least bake a few apple and blackberry tarts and to make some bramble jelly. But this year I intend to have a go at using some of the other hedge-fruits to see what I can concoct. Watch this space for some of my hedge-fruit endeavours. I will share the stories and the recipes of the ones that work out well!
Faraway Fields 