Country diary: Signs of autumn, early but unmistakable

The Guardian

20 hours ago

Beyond the coppiced hazels edging Pinsley Woods, outside Church Hanborough, wheatfields shimmered gold. A lizard skittered in leaf litter, making a racket as loud as a rodent. In the tallest hazel branches where nuts had ripened first, a pair of squirrels were flinging down cobnuts ('cob' meaning 'to throw gently' in Kentish dialect) to be picked up later, autumn on their mind.
Still downy, the fruit combined two subtle shades of lime and apple green. The other type of hazelnut besides the cob – the filbert – is a longer nut, named in honour of St Philibert of Jumièges whose feast day falls on 20 August, when the nuts are thought to ripen. Squirrels don't follow the church calendar, though, so I find empty casings scraped with rodent teeth marks.
Meanwhile, road verges are blushing with haws in various shades of red. Plums, sloes and black elderberries bend the branches. Feral apple trees too are becoming visible, linear orchards by the side of roads. Orchards are traditionally enclosed spaces, like the one at Wolvercote that I stumbled on last spring. A flock of long-tailed tits moved like flick knives through one lichened tree.
There was a memorial to Ralph Austen, whose Treatise of Fruit-trees, published in 1653, argued that planting orchards was the best way to improve land, using pigeon and hen dung, and cattle's blood as fertiliser. Fruit trees would feed the poor and lure them away from growing barley for beer.
Some of the roadside apple trees have fruit as showy as Christmas decorations. Windfalls spill out on to the hard shoulder, enticing passersby to stop. Few do, of course, because of the speeding traffic. But driving along the A420, I decide to take my chances, and pull over. I step among the indigo plumes of viper's bugloss and common mallow, wondering how many of these trees are the result of cores tossed from car windows. I approach a tree with fruit the size of cherries, more like crab apples. I bite it to its delicate core. It's tart but not bitter, and not cultivated for high sugar content – the essence of apple. Like the squirrels, I too sense the coming of a new season.
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