This is a mast year, a phenomenon of nature when trees are weighed down with an astonishing crop of nuts. The mast itself is the nut of beech trees, but a mast year includes all the other nuts of woodland trees – acorns, sweet chestnuts, conkers, hazel, ash, maple, lime and many others.
It is a bit of a mystery what synchronises all the trees to produce a bumper crop of seeds at the same time – it could be the weather, climate or some sort of innate rhythm in the trees themselves. But for lots of wildlife this is a great harvest before winter, and also for the hundreds of pigs set free to forage for nuts in the New Forest in the ancient right of pannage, which began earlier this month and runs for 60 days.
And for people, there are rich pickings of wild hazelnuts, green and sweet and often found growing in hedgerows, with the nuts wrapped in a frilly casing that looks like torn paper cups.
Berries have also appeared in a bonanza season that should make for good foraging. There are heaps of big blackberries, elderberries, bilberries, sloes, rowan berries and others and this could be thanks to the cold winter, a wet spring and a warm, dry summer, which has helped stimulate flowering and produce plenty of fruits.
Unfortunately the brambles that produce blackberries are thriving on nutrients washed into soils from fertilisers, and they are smothering many other plants.
.png?w=600)
