In early May, this blackthorn thicket had been smothered in the most spectacular display of blossom that I had ever seen and I made a mental note to return in autumn, to see if it had fulfilled its promise.
I’d intended to return sooner. Now it felt like the first real day of winter, and my breath turned to steam in the icy wind. In the shade of the trees beside the beck, where deep shadows would linger all day, fallen leaves were fringed with frost crystals.
Most of the hedgerow blackthorns hereabouts are brutally trimmed at regular intervals, but these seem never to have been molested and have become small trees.
I found them laden with such a crop of sloes as might, perhaps, be seen only once in a lifetime, on fruiting spurs of old wood encrusted with lichens, and on slender young twigs weighed down by their burden.
The crop on even the most accessible branches was untouched. No one, it seemed, had been interested in harvesting them for sloe gin; too late now, anyway, for most of the fruits. Frost had cracked them open, fungi had invaded and as they thawed brown liquid oozed from their wounds. Many were already shrivelling, wrinkled like prunes.
Only a few plump sloes retained that veneer of natural yeast that bestows such an exquisite pale blue bloom over indigo skins in early autumn.
Almost all will remain on the branches, withered and mummified, until spring. I have rarely seen birds eat them and with this year’s bumper hawthorn berry crop they are the least tempting fruit on offer. The most likely beneficiaries will be mice that gnaw through the hard stone to reach the kernels.
It seems such a waste that they should be food of last resort to seed dispersers but perhaps, for all this floral extravagance in spring and autumn abundance, that is all that is needed.
Once established, blackthorn spreads underground via suckers, so old thickets like this one could easily be a single clone, the product of one in a thousand seeds from one in a million flowers.
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