Carol Klein celebrates the joy of autumn’s abundant crops
Odd or predictable, fruit and berries on my favourite trees epitomise an abundant season
John Keats’ poem To Autumn rejoices – it celebrates the season with no hint of sadness. There are days and circumstances within those days, when contentment abounds and enjoying the moment is everything. Once again there seems to be an abundant harvest, the boughs of apple trees bent with the weight of fruit.
In Annie’s garden, her ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ has seldom had such a bountiful crop. At the other end another fruit tree, in this case a crab apple, is looking glorious. We planted our crab apple, ‘Golden Hornet’, 30 years ago. It was a spindly stick, with a few small branches sticking out and it was bare – bare roots, bare trunk, bare branches. It must have been November when we brought it home, with a small collection of other special trees and shrubs from the old Veitch’s nursery, outside Exeter. They travelled unceremoniously in the back of our old Land Rover!
I was nervous at that stage about planting anything that didn’t arrive in a pot, but I did what all the books told me: prepared the ground well and duly planted the tree. I had already built a wall below the place where it was to live and it took pride of place on the corner overlooking the track and what was to become Annie’s garden. There was no Annie then!
What a different place the garden looked all those years ago! Now it’s busy, wellpopulated and its most stately occupants are the trees, many of them full of berries now.
Our own native mountain ash, Sorbus aucuparia, has vivid orangey-red berries but these are stripped by hungry blackbirds and thrushes, and visiting fieldfares and redwings fairly early in the season. There are several Asiatic varieties though, whose berries will last deep
into the winter. What’s more, many of them make compact trees ideally suited to the smaller garden. Where there are berries there must have been flowers, and the umbels of dainty blooms that precede the berries of many varieties and species of sorbus are pretty enough in their own right.
In S. vilmorinii they’re creamy white with a touch of pale pink and are followed as the leaves turn crimson and red by clusters of small, pink berries that change gradually to white.
Our own rowan is a match for any of the more exotic species, and our native spindle,
Euonymus europaeus, has much to commend it and can give its Asiatic counterparts a run for their money. In the selection
E. europaeus ‘Red Cascade’, the autumn colour is brilliant and the fruits are prolifically produced, quartered pink capsules that open to reveal vivid orange seeds which hang down as they ripen. When my mum was visiting us at this time of year, she would always take home a few pieces of spindle from our hedge and a bunch of pink schizostylis.
Taking hardwood cuttings from Viburnum opulus, I’m sidetracked by its translucent red berries – just what you imagine berries to be. Elsewhere the berries of Clerodendrum
trichotomum are positively unreal, with a turquoise sheen. Whether they’re odd or predictable, fruit and berries epitomise the season.