September 26th – There’s still a bountiful crop of elderberries for the taking out in the hedgerows, thickets and copses of the area. I spent a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon getting very red fingers collecting for a family winemaker.
Elderberries make a gorgeously dark, potent wine that in the the hands of a skilled winemaker can be way better than any shop-bought red wine.
One of the benefits of autumn!
September 26th – On my way home in the road in the backstreets of Walsall, I spotted these large acorns in unusually hairy cups. Not having seen the like before, I assumed there were some kind f insect gall.
Looking it up when I got home, these are actually the acorns f a turkey oak, and quite normal for the species. I’ve never seen them before, and they’re quite alien after the familiar gnarled, knobbly normal acorn cup one usually sees.
An interesting oddity.
September 24th – Near Anchor Bridge on the canal at Brownhills, autumn isn’t much in evidence apart from a chill in the air and a strong wind with a familiarly hostile edge.
But in a canalside garden, a healthy crop of what appear to be good cooking apples. Bet they’d make a nice pie.
September 19th – Yet another abundance this year of bright orange-red cotoneasters, so beloved of blackbirds, who upon finding a bush, will fight off challengers, usually while another steals the sugary berries.
These bright fruits – another clear sign of autumn – line hedgerows, cycleways and towpaths, and seem a very popular bush to plant on industrial estate verges, which is good for birds and bees alike.
September 18th – Ah, the season of the conker.
Every year, I point out the same truism: that few men can pass a conker lying on the ground and not pop it into their pocket. It’s a primal instinct from childhood, when they were seemingly so rare, and highly prized.
Despite the leaf-miners and cankers, the horse chestnuts have had a fruitful year and the beautifully shiny, leathery nuts lie in their split spiky husks on the ground beneath many a rural tree. This one, spotted near Burntwood, ended up in my pocket too.
It’s be rude not to.
September 12th – The Autumn fruits are starting to come with abundance now, and few are more welcome than the bright reds and oranges of the rosehips. Where there were beautiful wayside flowers a few months ago, there are now gorgeous, shiny berries providing a feast for wildlife and a splash of welcome colour in the hedgerow.
The diversity of shapes and colours of these little-appreciated fruits is interesting, too.
Always a nice compensation for the ending of summer.
August 30th – Today was a great day to be zipping about the Black Country on my bike, seeing people I needed to see, The streets, the urban architecture, the market at Tipton.
It all glistened like a jewel in the sun.
I said there would still be fine days to come and I wasn’t wrong. Yet again, my beloved Black Country lifted my spirits and filled me with a sense of belonging.
These are the places I love.
August 5th – Interesting to note the fruits doing well this year and those that aren’t. We seem to have bounteous quantities of blackberries, acorns and here, sycamore seeds. Beech also seems to be fairly prodigious.
Not doing so well at all are the horse chestnut, hazel and pear trees.
It’s curious how the years cycle. As my Grandad used to say ‘It’s always a good year for something’.
July 28th – Inexorably sliding now from the flowering to the fruiting, I notice the first blackberries are making their appearance in the hedgerows, scrubs and thickets.
It looks like another bumper crop this year, that’s certain to result in the baking of many a pie, crumble or tart.
A real treat for the foragers…
July 27th – A foul commute in steady rain and a headwind, with the greasy roads I’d experienced a couple of days ago. There was really nothing at all to commend cycling this morning.
And then I passed the ripening rowan berries, bright orange and glistening with raindrops, and the morning didn’t seem as grim anymore.
I love how nature does that.
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