Rain has finally remembered us, but it’ll take a long time to refill the ditches out on the grazing marshes. My local river is still running, or ambling, whatever a Norfolk river does. I caught a rare glimpse of a water shrew scurrying between lake and river the other afternoon, but on the whole wildlife seems to be taking the weather as it finds it.
The shock is in the hedgerow. This summer of fierce heat and little rain has grown a fruit garden of banquet proportions.
These are haws, the fruit of the hawthorn. The blackthorn, its notoriously prickly companion, produces sloes that dangling from the gnarled twigs like so many plums.
Blackthorn was once thought to be ancestral to the domestic plum, but genetic analysis has pointed elsewhere. In fairness, sloes warrant the inverse of whatever kindly adjectives might be given to plums. Dry, dry, dry, sharp and sour. But they are traditionally picked after the first frost to flavour various drinks.
Then there is elder, also having a bumper year.
And snowberry, which may catch the eye with its ghostly fruit, but unlike the others, is far from a welcome sight; in the UK, it’s an invasive species, threading its way across native scrubby habitats. I don’t really understand why known problem plants like snowberry and cherry laurel are still available for people to plant in their gardens – they do not stay there.
But most of my attention has been on crab apples. To be precise, the hundreds that have rained on my garden from a single crab apple tree, turning the parched lawn into a mosaic of yellow and pink.
I gathered a few and mixed them with some local blackberries. That’s my jam supplies sorted for a while.
It’ll be interesting to see how wildlife exploits the bounty that’s still outside.
A Walk with Wildlife 