Rosemary McLeod: Fruits dead and berried
Let me just mention strawberries, so exciting each year when they first appear.
A plant in the garden of my last house produced them in ones and threes, never more, in spring and into summer. You were lucky if the birds didn't get them first, so you ate them slowly, first inhaling their smell with gratitude. You may remember such a thing.
The plant grew where nothing with half a brain would dream of it, in rocky soil, on a hillside. It was neglected, seldom watered, and often forgotten - until the first flush of pink on the first berry.
Those berries had a perfume, actually, not a smell, unlike the artificial strawberry stuff they put in ice cream and milkshakes, whipped up in laboratories. Scientists never get the point about sensual things - think white-coated Masters and Johnson on the mechanics of sex. In any case, when was anything artificial as good as the real thing?
The smell of a ripe, real strawberry picked a second ago on a fine day is so good you wish you could wear it: fulsome, aromatic, delicious, and delicate. The berry seems too good to put in your mouth, but too enticing not to. Only raspberries can compete - later, in summer. They're worth staining your fingers and clothing for, and getting scratched - but it's strawberries that are the harbingers of our chilly spring.
I left that plant behind when I moved house; it seemed mean not to. It was pretty old; the house itself was well over 100, and it certainly looked different from the strawberries I bought this week.
My old strawberries were round, with delicate skin and soft flesh. The juice burst into your mouth, sweet yet sharp, and their aroma was divine. But that was then.
I bought, this week, a packet of red things in a punnet, under plastic. They were a mixture of red, white and green, understandable early in the season, but not pretty. They were as hard as radishes, though with a coarser texture; perhaps they should be grated. They smelled like nothing much. The only way I like to eat them is in a raspberry coulis, made from frozen berries, where they give more texture than taste, so why bother? This is what we now call strawberry, and if you can buy another kind I'd like to know where and when I can lay hands on them.
The ones we get now are, I guess, a miracle of chemistry and botany, impervious to rain, hail, combine harvesters, meat cleavers, truck journeys, gardeners' heavy footprints, able to linger on supermarket shelves, and possibly useful for playing table tennis. They taste, a little, of plastic. I'd pay four times as much for a punnet of real ones.
As for my old plant, they wrecked whatever garden I had after they bought the house, and it went to the tip, with the old roses I'd thought it would be mean to take with me, and the Victorian terracotta planters I foolishly thought they'd appreciate.
I doubt that it's possible to like the people who buy your house, whoever they are, and it's certainly a mistake to return. They rip down the wrong walls, paint rooms the wrong colour, make horrible kitchens, and with a sure instinct destroy whatever you liked about the place, especially the garden.
I remember the truck that came, when new people moved in, and the men flinging plants into it. I wonder what the crabapple, the pink hawthorn, the sweet-scented old roses and that tenacious strawberry had done to offend. And I never buy strawberries without remembering what they ought to be, what they used to be, and knowing what they are not.
