Throughout the North Pennine dales there are traces of long-forgotten cottage gardens. They are easy to spot: just look for seemingly indestructible rhubarb plants or the old pot herb Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus), growing among heaps of stones that once formed walls and houses.
The most common survivors in these ghost gardens are gooseberries, so, at this time of year, a walk around remote former upland habitations can become a fruit-tasting expedition. Some are breathtakingly sour but occasionally there will be one with a sweetness and flavour that is delightful. The best that we have ever found grows in a retaining wall here beside the river Tees.
The fruit has a kind of beastly beauty, with a smooth skin protected by stiff bristles but with the colour and translucency of a purple jewel when held up to the sun. Those intimidating spines dictate that the only way to eat it is in the manner of a fresh fig, split open with the contents sucked out. Unless it’s wiped away quickly, the juice stains fingers and chin purple.
Gooseberries are resilient, long-lived plants. We have seen this one hacked down twice by a flail and yet this year it is back again, more vigorous than ever. These are qualities that made them such popular fruits in northern workers’ gardens during the industrial revolution, when growing the largest berries for annual gooseberry shows became intensely competitive. More than 1,000 local varieties had been bred by the end of the 19th century, with grandiose names such as Matchless and Roaring Lion. History does not record whether Nelson ever tasted Hero of the Nile, the gooseberry named to celebrate his naval victory of 1798.
Our nameless prickly berry is most likely the result of random recombination of genes in a seed dispersed in a bird dropping, rather than a surviving variety from the golden age of the gooseberry, but it is part of a living, feral gene pool of these tart fruits that have fallen out of favour.
This spring, I rooted a cutting that’s growing well in our garden and is set to become a family horticultural heirloom. We are going to call it Teesdale Purple Porcupine.
