From the hedgerow

The abundance of fresh, tasty and free fruit at this time of year is a wonder to behold. Our hedges are bursting with plump, delicious blackberries weighing down the brambles and staining our fingers, apples and pears of every variety filling orchards, gardens and roadsides, trees groaning with plums, damsons, quinces, the list goes on. Our country is so rich in its produce and a delight we should savour.

As Autumn advances, the fruit harvest takes on a central importance and kitchens bustle with cooks hovering over huge battered pans of jams and chutneys, flavouring gins and wines and bagging up fruit to sell at local farmers' markets or on makeshift tables at the cottage door.

The allotments too take on a new lease of life, far from bedding down for winter, there is the harvest of the last of the tomatoes and runner beans and the welcome crop of potatoes, carrots, marrows and pumpkins is revealed in its place. It fascinates me. I love it all. I love to watch the allotment gardeners in the fading light, bent and absorbed, capturing all of the day, using every bit of it. Their reward to trudge home with a treasure of freshly grown and lovingly tended produce. Remind me why anyone would buy imported fresh food from a supermarket again??

I have the good fortune to have a damson tree in my garden and each September it never fails to delight and entice me with its bounty of ripe, sweet, purple fruit. The ritual of picking is one I relish, climbing the tree, balancing precariously and shaking the branches to release the fruit onto the mossy ground below. The same day they are pricked and steeped in jars of sugar, gin and this year, vodka too. By next year they will be ready for a tipple on the cold mornings of the game shoot or to drink by the fire at Christmas time. I have also tried chutney this year, which I await to taste with baited breath. That may take a little more work, I fear!

As the seasons change and each brings with it its own special riches and expectations, the inherent traditions continue and one lesson perhaps to learn is that we must conserve our hedgerows and our countryside and allow it to continue to thrive. How poor our life would be without it.