Snapping and crunching beneath my boots, beech mast coats the road like praline brittle on The Great British Bake Off. It's an abundant year for the beech, the pulverised seeds revealing their creamy fat-laden contents, food for squirrels, mice, rats and birds. The cracking sounds, the fallen leaves, the scent of autumn bring memories of childhood racing back.
Last year's mild winter and this summer's drawn-out warmth, have resulted in many of my garden plants being brimful of seed. I fill paper bags from the heads of spiky sea holly, starry astrantia, allium, campion and poppy. With their chaff blown away, the cleaned seeds will rest in a drawer till next spring's sowing.
Berries glow orange-red on fleshy arum stalks like sinister corn on the cob – poisonous lords and ladies shining among the dying leaves of the shaded border. The long summer has resulted in so much plenty. Down little lanes the bramble thickets are scalloped out where bodies have pressed in to gather blackberries from their arching vines. The early October half-term was called "blackberry week" in north-east England, a time for the family to go out gathering fruit for pies and winter stores of jams.
The most bizarre fruit I have seen this autumn was on a climbing plant in the Cumbrian garden of Winderwath. Plump and oval, the shape of a Cornish pasty, its mottled amethyst skin had split open to reveal a white fibrous pulp studded with black seeds. An Asian plant, Akebia quinata, it is called the chocolate vine because of its springtime vanilla-scented flowers.
This edible curiosity is cultivated for food in Japan. It is hard to believe that this large fat fruit is produced from such small purple flowers. It needs to be cross-pollinated by a different clone, which is one reason why the fruit is less often seen, and it also needs a hot summer.
Maybe I should have tried it when offered, but I balked at eating this vividly coloured alien-looking fruit, preferring to stick with the sweetly tart blackberries of the hedgerows.
Twitter: @cottagegardener
