FRUITS OF THE FIELD.
OCTOBER sees the last of the harvesting of the wild fruits of field and wood, and this year the crop must have been one of the heaviest in the memory of the country-side. The mature sun of autumn has followed the long summer To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core ; To swell the gourd and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel . . ."
And possibly one of the most persistent of reflections during the last few weeks, when the ingathering of the apple crop has followed the earliest corn-harvest of our time, has been the realization of the falseness of the prophecy that this autumn we should have no fruit in the South of England because we had no hive bees. When the disease which started in the Isle of Wight spread to Hampshire and Sussex and Surrey, and garden after garden lost its bee population, there were gloomy predictions that the stone-fruit crop would fail be- cause there were no hive bees to carry the pollen from flower to flower and so to fertilize the waiting cells. However, the predictions and not the fruit crops have failed—as indeed one or two optimistic gardeners thought they would. Mrs. Hautenville Cope, for instance, wrote to the Times in the middle of May expressing doubt as to whether hive bees played so large a part in fertilizing fruit as was generally supposed. She had observed that the earlier blossoms of cherry and plum were fertilized by wild bees, which also fertilized raspberries, and she noticed the way in which dif- ferent flowers were visited by different species of bees. She came to the conclusion that some of the wild bees, notably bombus and psithyrus, since they are more hairy than the hive bee, are better able to carry pollen; and she expressed the belief that blossoms were also fertilized by many of the outdoor flies. The events of this summer seem to prove that she was right, for the absence of the usual number of hive bees, owing to losses by the Isle of Wight disease, does not appear to have had any effect on the fruit crops. Garden fruits and wild fruits, bee-fertilized and wind-fertilized, have been equally plentiful. The long sunshine and the lack of rain have brought to maturity an enormous quantity of fruit which in an ordinary season would never have set, or would have been killed by late frosts ; and as if that were not enough, the rains which followed the drought set their own store of natural food in the fields as well as the woods and hedges. The farmer who has got in a good harvest of hay and corn is deprived of his proverbial grumble about the badness of the mushroom season ; mushrooms are on all the breakfast tables. Farmers, it is true, may well grumble on another score, for in many parts of the country it is the worst season for roots within living memory. Indeed, there are no roots ; and a traveller in one of the eastern counties at the end of August described his experience as one of the strangest he had known: he had passed through field after field of what ought to have been turnips and mangels, and had found nothing but stench and decay.
A summer such as this has a very marked effect on the colour of the landscape, seen at a distance or near at hand. In an ordinary year we become used about July to a dull monotone of bottle-green, which settles down on the country- side as if the woods and hedges had been wrapped up like the furniture of a house at the end of the season. But in a year of steady sunshine such as this the woods turn to different tints long before September ; the oaks even in August are touched with copper-brown on the edges of their curling leaves as the chlorophyll retreats to stem and twig, and yellow patches set themselves like sun-lined pockets high in the elms. In the hedges at a distance there are other strips and bundles of pale yellow : you come nearer down the side of the field to them, and the strips separate themselves into crab-apple boughs laden and bending out of the hedge, broken, it may be, at the joining of the branch by the weight of clustering fruit.
A week or two more and the parched grasses under the tree are carpeted with clean yellow, though fruit still hangs heavy from the bough ; the last apples of the year will not drop till the rain and wind of October sets them bare on the stripped branches. It is not often that you can pick in October crab-apples with the anthocyanin redder in their cheeks than this year's suns have burned it, nor often that the delicate scent of the apple clings about it so strongly. But of scents of October sunshine there is no more pervading fragrance than that of the blackberry. Blackberries have the same muskiness which belongs to phloxes and wet oak and bonfires in the rain: it is a scent which blows from October hedges like wind from pinewoods, but like the scent of pinewoods it must be drawn by the sun. In a year of full sunshine you may get a rather curious result from black- berries growing in a hedge running east and west. If the hedge is high and thick the blackberries on the southern side ripen and fall early in September ; on the cool northern side the arching clusters of fruit still show green and crimson berries next to the black, even, perhaps, into December. But the rain soaks the heart out of them; just as on the branches of the wild rose next the blackberry in the hedge it rots the vermilion hips for the thrushes and blackbirds to tear the seeds from their hairy jacket. If plants could be credited with conscious forethought, there could be no more simple or effective arrangement than the capping of each hip with the rough, projecting edges of the fallen flower's corolla, which hangs rain-like jewels and catches the moisture back to the smooth red surface until it has rotted through to the bidden nutlets which are to seed the rose again, perhaps, a quarter of a mile away.
In the spread of autumn fruits on every hadgerow and under every tree there is a splendid sense of prodigality, of the lavish spending and waste which belongs to the great natural processes of growth and life and dying. Of the acorns fallen round a hedgerow or woodland oak, perhaps not a single one in a century may come to a tree; and they lie very close together, each with its potential sap and root and stem strong in it, needing only the covering of earth and the health of sunlight to set it beside its parent. The writer recently counted the acorns lying in patches taken at random under a single oak which stands at the edge of a garden lawn. There were sixteen acorns to the square foot in each of the selected patches—a curious coincidence of numbers—and the spread of the tree was a little more than twelve yards by twelve. If sixteen acorns to the foot might be taken as an average, then there were something like twenty thousand possible trees strewn below their parent, and not one of them will ever bear a leaf. Yet the spread of fruit on the ground, with all its waste of vital growth, has somewhere about it a sense of fulness and rejoic- ing. Keats knew that feeling of wild feasting in autumn, and set it in "Endymion" as surely as in the opening of the " Ode to Autumn" :—
" Whence came ye, jolly Satyrs ! whence came ye! So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left Your nuts in oak-tree cleft ?—
'For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms And cold mushrooms ; For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth; Great god of breathless cups and chirping mirth!'"
But, of course, acorns need by no means be wasted, any more than the berries and nuts of the rest of the autumn harvest. Acorns feed as many animals as oak leaves feed insects ; there is no tree which supplies food more freely through the round of the year. Acorns were food for swine long before Domesday Book was written, and acorns are still gathered by country children for farmyard pigs and ducks. Pheasants stray as far for acorns as for blackberries; wood- pigeons cram their greedy crops full with them; rooks and jackdaws stalk and prod in the grass under the oaks, and Mr. Beach Thomas in his book "From a Hertfordshire Cot- tage" describes bow he has seen rats in the very early morn- ing under an oak tree feeding "like swine." And the actual weight of fruit borne by a single tree in a year such as this can be prodigious. Acorns go roughly a hundred to the pound, so that a crop of twenty thousand would weigh something less than two hundredweight, and a group of a dozen trees of the same bearing capacity would carry over a ton of fruit.
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