Fruit of the hedgerow

FROM one day to the next, a rather dowdy little tree in an out-of-the-way corner of the acre has erupted in showy blossom: the first such fit of florescence since it was planted more than 10 years ago. The Victoria is supposed to be self-fertile, so there seems a real chance we shall be dribbling our very own plum juice down our chins this summer; another small concession wrung from the Atlantic winds.

Last summer, of course, brought heroic crops of garden fruit all over the island. A farmer friend in Tipperary told of plums so weighing down their branches that they had to be tied up for fear of breaking.

"I am convinced," he wrote, "that the trees knew in advance that this summer was coming. I don't see why a slow-thinking tree cannot learn, in a few million generations, to recognise a summer in a hundred - the one in which to go for broke in its investment of fruit and seed for replication."

Perhaps, somewhere in its patient fibres, the sun also reminded our little Victoria that life is for living.

In a sense, that could literally be what happened, since a long, hot summer helps a tree to build up extra reserves for the formation of next spring's flower buds. Our garden plum is not alone in putting on such a brilliant show. All along the boreens, the blackthorn - ancestor to our cultivated plums - has hemmed the fields in the finest froth of white blossom I can recall this autumn could see a truly opulent crop of sloes.

It is in years like that I regret the wasted potential of Ireland's thousands of miles of hedgerow. Such linear orchards of wild fruit they could be and, indeed, once were.

In thrifty Ulster, as one might expect, there are still whole hedges of bullace, Prunus insititia, the wild black plum from which the damson was derived. By the River Quoile in Co Down, and in farm avenues in the south of Co Derry are two good places to look.,

And at both ends of the island, merging into drifts of early hawthorn, are occasional, pink-tipped clouds of flowering crab apple trees, Malus sylvestris. These once grew wild in many rough glens of Ireland - "trees of apples, huge and magic," as one seventh-century hermit exulted.

The trees are still surprisingly plentiful among natural woodlands on Lough Neagh. And in walking the Burren for his lovely book on that wilderness, Charles Nelson found a particularly fine specimen: "There is an old apple tree in the wood that shelters in the first swirl of Mullach Mor. In autumn small creamy apples flushed pink, litter the ground underneath. In bygone days these would have been gathered, for nothing was wasted in the countryside."

It can take a botanist to be sure that a crab apple is really what it seems, for many hedgerow "wildings" have sprouted from apple cores tossed away at the roadside. Their fruit can be small and wickedly tart in flavour, but hairy undersides to the mature leaves are a sure sign of domestic origin, and the apples are often far too big: the true crab is less than three centimetres in diameter.

There was nothing amiss, however, in the flavour and colour of a little pot of crab apple jelly sent, to me lately, or in its companion samples of damson, blackberry, fraochan and elderberry preserves. These are products of a new Irish enterprise, based in Limerick, of just the sort to benefit the countryside.

Wild Irish Fruits Ltd, with "Grainne" as its trademark, is the brainchild of a young food scientist, Joe Carroll, who runs the business with his father. He noted the success of a Swedish company in wooing ethnic nostalgia with confections of fruits such as cloudberry, and decided he could follow suit.

ADVERTISEMENTS in local papers and the Irish Farmer's Journal brought reassuring offers of supply. One Limerick farmer has no fewer than 10 crab apple trees growing together on one ditch. Another, in Co Clare, could offer damsons from a substantial thicket growing close to an old monastery and quite possibly planted originally by the monks, for wine.

Last year's bumper harvest of wild fruits have set the Carrolls's business up with a three-year supply of pulps - not just for "preserves" (so much fruitier than mere jams), but for sophisticated sauces - rowanberry, blackberry, elderberry - and a crab apple chutney.

The current promise of a sloe bonanza has them thinking of sloe jelly. Cyril and Kit O Ceirin, whose 1978 book Wild and Free (from the O'Brien Press) is such a generous source of recipes, recommends combining crab apples and sloes for a jelly guaranteed to surprise, but not pucker, the palate. They also prescribe a healthy sounding liquor called "verjuice, a very old kind of vinegar made from the juice of the crab apple and really a slightly fermented - and very sharp - cider.

There is no end to the subtle and delicious conserves, sauces and relishes to be confected from Ireland's hedgerow fruit. Yet, already, some of the pickers recruited by Wild Irish Fruits have lamented the damage done to crab apple and damson trees when farmers "trim their internal hedgerows (fruit is not picked from roadside trees, so the county council slashers are not, for once, the villains).

Perhaps the new market has arrived just in time to give our wild fruit trees a value that could keep them alive and in good shape.