THE WILD FRUIT GARDEN.
ASPELL of singular fascination waits about the ripeness of fruits growing wild. It was cast first, perhaps, in the years when nuts and berries were less a luxury than a staple diet, and it keeps its own memories. It is a spell set somewhere in all the elemental pleasures of life and wildness,— the pleasures of running swiftly, of swimming, of swinging up into trees at the full stretch of the arm, of the touch of sand, of sleeping in a warm wind, of getting wet through. To a child the life that is best worth living is the untrammelled wandering through woodways, with dew and spring-water to drink, cnl berries to pick and eat. John the Baptist, that strange, strong figure wbo comes into the child's Bible like a shout, stirs the pulse of the real wilderness with his crying in the open places, and his raiment of camel's-hair, and his rough-won diet of locusts and honey. The child reading of sailors shipwrecked on desert islands knows that there can be no such joys for the hungering men as to dig the yams and cassavas, and pull the breadfruit, and drain the cocoanut of its milk. Children love even to store wild fruits, like squirrels, in secret caches of their own. Crab-apples, hazelnuts, beech- nuts, walnuts,—they will stow them away in carefully made hiding-places, harking to some vague call in the autumn wind, and will forget them ; or remember them with curiosity a month afterwards, and find the crab-apples a pulp and the nuts taken by real squirrels. Blackberries they will not store, but eat ; and that, too, may be half a memory.
The berries are the best of all. There are so many of them, and they are all so bright, and most of them sweet to taste and cool in the sun. Their names describe them with the clearest precision, and their names, for other reasons, have always been attractive to sensible persons. It was Sheridan, or some other impecunious wit, who was aghast at the account sent him by his doctor, whose name was Berry. He immediately addressed to him a sort of fruticetum of polite letters. " So you've sent in your bill, Berry, before it was due, Berry. Your father, the elder Berry, would have waited till the snow, Berry. But I don't care a straw, Berry," he went on ; or if he did not, perhaps the original text exists somewhere to correct misquotations. He could hardly have avoided remarking that to receive any bill at any time was the one thing be did bar, Berry. The names of the fruits are really as carefully suited as Sheridan's puns. What could a goose- berry be but rotund and a trifle gross ? The Frenchman, it is true, has found a better name still, groseille,—it is almost a portrait of the fruit. What forest feast could hold a prettier dish than a wooden bowl of wild strawberries ? Or the fruit might be gathered in a bunch, in handfuls, from the open spaces where it strews the floor of the wood, or from the hedgerow where it grows long and limber in the grasses over the drying primrose-leaves of May. Black- berries, again,—the whole of a September common is in the word. The dark, shining fruit, clustering ripe and heavy in the gloom of the hedge, heaped in the juice-wet baskets, hot and scented in the sun ; the patter of a falling leaf, the breath of warm oak-bark ; the black eyes and brown arms of gypsy children; no other wild fruit has quite so many meanings of autumn packed in the sound of it. The dew- berry is another perfect name. The grey bloom on the dew- berry is the grey of heavy dew on a shaven lawn ; you brush the bloom, and it is as if you swept a patch of dark into the drenched floor of grass. But the wild berry of most delicate bloom of all is the berry of July and August heat. The bilberry has many other names; perhaps it
should be the hill-berry, that the grouse fill their crops with in the Scottish heather, though the Scottish for it is blaeberry, and blae is exactly the right tint of purple-blue with grey bloom on it. But in England it is the bilberry, or the whortleberry, or the plain hurt which has named Hurt Wood and Hurt Common, and which the country children pronounce with a rough roll, so that the "r" comes somehow immediately after the "h." But they all mean the same thing. Bilberry has somewhere a note of fullness and fertility in it, and the bilberries and whortleberries are the berries which stain the mouths of strong, sun-tanned, white- frocked children truant on Surrey hills.
The taste that prefers wild fruit is a little rare, and certainly delicate, but it belongs to health. A philosopher has suggested that nobody can be a bad man who likes apples ; but it is still possible to appreciate apples and to find most wild fruits rather insipid. Some of them are most markedly not insipid, and yet are not fruits for eating. The sloe may flavour an excellent liqueur, but it is not to be plucked and bitten. The very name begins with the hiss of an intaken breath; the diphthong is a grimace. The wild cherry is only a little less acid ; the crab-apple, which sets as pure a cloud of snow and roses in the hedgerow as the cider-grower's tree in the orchard, bears a fruit that may be cooked, but forbids, eating raw. The crab-apple's cousins, the wild rose and the whitethorn, provide dishes which can be tasted but which could hardly appease hunger. The hip of the wild rose, which scientific botanists urge is painted so bright a red to show the birds where they may incidentally get breakfast, and do the proper work of the tree by carrying the seed to another hedge, is a fruit to be passed by. The birds like it, especially the bullfinches; but it has a hard and bristly interior which may suit bullfinches very well, but which a plain man cannot swallow. The haws of the whitethorn are a little better. There are those who profess even to enjoy them, to find a virtue in the tartness of the outer skin, and a flavour of sweet cheese in the yellow flesh of the berry. But the enthusiasm with which they advise recourse to the fruit is to be suspected. They are too vigorous in their praise. A judicial mind decides that the berry is of wood, wooden ; that it would compare ill with an unripe banana of its own size ; that it. repels the curious, and can please only the eccentric. Yet another of the roses, the rowan-tree, carries berries which are a feast for thrushes, but which have a vividness about their red which is unattractive. The fruit of the yew is a more delicate crimson, and is not, as prudent nurses tell children it is, in the least poisonous. But it is not a dessert fruit, even for the wildest picnic. Nor is the elderberry, which has some- thing mawkish in its sweetness, and suggests the tannin of stewed tea like the cranberry. The best of the wild fruits which have come into the kitchen-garden is the raspberry. In Scotland the wild raspberries ripen in mid-September; in England they are in the hedges and the gardens at the same time. But even the wild raspberry cannot excel the blackberry. The blackberry, for strength and delicacy of flavour, and for the aroma of the sun-warmed fruit, stands alone.
Could a real sustenance be got out of the wild fruit garden, in any month of the year ? The vegetarian who decides to make nuts his staple diet would not go much hungrier in a woodland of hazel when the green has shaded to brown. He could make a fair meal, if a rather monotonous one, out of hazelnuts, though he must not, of course, be allowed any salt if he is to go properly wild. His dessert would have little variety. In no English forest would he find a Moth and a Cobweb who could " Feed him with apricoeks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries."
Dewberries he might get, but blackberries and wild raspberries would be easier to dish up on a dock-leaf. Beeehmast he would not like as well as the wood-pigeons. Acorns are an excellent sate for pheasants and wild pigs, but he could hardly join them. The sweet chestnut might be allowed him, even if it was once a foreigner; it has been long enough with us to be domiciled. The walnut he should have, and should get his fingers black in trying for the kernel. Nuts, indeed, Titania would allow him in profusion ; he world have almost. too many nuts. But not for long. They would drop, or the- squirrels would have them, in a month or two, and he would go hungry or leave England for Brazil.
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