Natural wonders to watch out for this week…

TWHAT TO SPOT BLACKBERRIES

he pandemic in our midst has put paid to an old seasonal ritual of mine. Typically, every year at the end of August my wife and I go to stay with her extended family in a Welsh seaside cottage. On the final day, we always take our nieces blackberry picking.

Seamus Heaney once wrote a poem about blackberry picking that neatly describes how we end up after an hour or so strimming the hedgerows: “our hands were peppered with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s”.

And that is not to mention the syrupy spiders and drowsy wasps we disturb that have burrowed deep into the fruit and rest in blissful drunken repose. The bites and stings we endure are small tribulations, though, compared to the magnificent crumble we always make with the harvest.

This year, crumble is cancelled (the holiday, too). Piling four households into a cottage, so crammed that my wife and I invariably end up camping in the garden, feels like we would be breaking every Covid regulation under the sun. And leaving ourselves open to a dawn raid by the North Wales constabulary.

It feels strange not to be doing it this year – even in the context of many of the altogether more profound disruptions to our lives of the past few months. We all have these small and personal waymarks by which we mark the passing year – as humans it is rooted deep within our psyche. Their obliteration is one of the many minor cruelties of coronavirus.

In the era of rapid climate change, though, few seasonal activities are set in stone. It is not just the emergence of novel viruses that threaten future blackberry expeditions – or at least the month in which we do them.

Traditionally, the end of August has always been the optimum time for blackberry picking. Even Heaney was at pains to set his poem in late August where, in the poet’s words, “given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen”.

But, in recent years, it appears as if blackberries may be ripening far earlier. The Woodland Trust’s Nature’s Calendar project, which monitors the signs of the seasons – and how they are being disrupted as the climate changes – has found that over the past 10 years or so the first fruiting date of blackberries has morphed from August to late July.

While local weather conditions on any given year are hugely important, there does appear to be a wider shift taking place.

It is the same with other wild fruits. Bilberries, which in late summer carpet the moors of northern England, are also now appearing in July.

Humans are nothing but flexible and as the seasons change we learn to quickly adapt. There may be no Welsh blackberries for us this summer, but today we are, instead, taking our nieces cycling down an old railway track near our house.

I wonder if the tradition will be passed on and if in a few decades’ time our adult nieces will pass on the foraging mantle?

And such is the speed of change taking place around us, I wonder if come August 2040 the blackberries will still be there to pick?