Each morning after breakfast I took
a basket out to the middle garden. I had arrived at the peak of the strawberry
season, and I marvelled at how quickly the berries ripened on their sprawling
vines. Every day there were new splashes of red, hiding away under the gently
serrated, teardrop- shaped leaves which were always grouped in threes.
Crouching down to save my back, my legs brushed against the plants bathing in
morning dew. The movement released the sweet scent of the strawberries and of
the wild spearmint that was pushing up between the tiny bushes. Sometimes, if I
had missed them the day before, the berries were overripe and blistered upon
contact with my fingers, bleeding their fragrance in rivulets over my skin.
These berries were the sweetest, and they never made it to the basket, much
less to the kitchen; they were the farmhand’s treat.
The children’s treat, on the other
hand, was home-made strawberry ice cream. Any strawberries that survived the
morning uneaten were stored in the freezer. Mid- afternoon they were extracted
by Anne-Marie, who introduced them quickly to the blender before they could
defrost in the heat wave. She added a sprinkle of caster sugar and a squeeze of
lemon juice, and called the troops to table from whatever battle they had been
playing out in the sawdust. It was heavenly. Once the strawberries were over,
we moved onto blackcurrants, and once the blackcurrants finished, the
raspberries should have been ripe, but I never found out: I was over the hill
and not so far away by then.
After the strawberries, it was time
to go out collecting chestnut flowers. The Ardèche was a region famous for its
chestnut products, mostly its marrons
glacés, or candied chestnuts. But it was not only the fruits of the tree
which are transported to the luxury food shelves of the supermarkets. That
happened in the autumn when the nuts were ready to harvest. For about three weeks
in the summer, the trees were in full bloom, and I arrived at the beginning of
the season for these fleurs de châtaigner.
The smell was pungently sweet – verging on sickly despite definite chetnutty
undertones – and very distinctive. Some locals said it smelled like semen. I preferred
not to dwell on it.
There were no chestnut trees on the
farm itself, and Anne-Marie couldn’t take me to where they were as she would
normally, no thanks to her dancing exploits, so she drew me a rudimentary map
and told me to fill the two baskets she gave me. Off I went in my floppy sunhat,
feeling a little bit like Little Red Riding Hood skipping off into the forest,
except without the necessary cape. Up to the main road I skipped, and along it
for a way and then up an exposed stony path which wound in zigzags up to the
borders of a wood, beyond which I could see nothing. As Anne-Marie’s map
predicted, the path split in two, the left-hand remaining in full sunlight
while the right-hand disappeared into the trees. I turned right. A little way
along was where my first clump of chestnut trees would be; I was to recognise
them primarily by the large yurt hiding behind them. I didn’t need to look for
the yurt though: the trees themselves were obvious enough.
Unlike the horse chestnut
of the UK – which I discovered was in fact not a chestnut at all – the leaves
of these chestnut trees were long and pointed, deep green and waxy above, light
and papery below, curling slightly at the edges giving the appearance of being
more spear-like than they actually were. Amongst the leaves lay the blossom,
also in needle formation. Each needle of blossom was about 15cm long. I had
worried on my walk that I wouldn’t be able to tell whether the blossom was
ready for Anne-Marie, but my fears had been for nothing. If the flowers were yet to bloom, the needles
resembled petrified snakes – stiff, dry and covered in tiny greeny-brown
scales. If they were past their best, they were the burnt yellow colour of the
desert and softly spiny. Anne-Marie had asked for fluffy, and there was
fluffiness in abundance, pale bright yellow fluffiness as if a thousand miniature
parsnip-coloured longhaired cats were stuck in the branches of the tree, their
tails hanging down.
The lowest cat-tails hung at chest
level, and I quickly stripped the first tree of these, moving up and around
until they began to tease me just beyond the reach of my fingertips. That was
when I started jumping, glad that I had chosen sturdy walking boots over flimsy
sandals and stumbling from time to time as I misjudged a large stone or two upon
landing. Once I had exhausted that possibility, I jumped for the highest
branches possible, and dragged them down, shimmying as far into the tree along
the pliant branches as I could without my feet leaving the ground. It was
whilst in this somewhat compromising position, astride a large leafy branch and
with so much pollen in my hair that I appeared blonde rather than brunette,
that three things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that my watch
strap was ripped from my wrist by a particularly violent branch, which was
irritating as it was a new watch and I was rather fond of it. The second was
that, glancing down, I noticed that my bra, which had been white, was now
yellow from fallen pollen, and more importantly that a couple of sizeable
beetles had taken residence in it. They weren’t doing me any harm and could
easily have been there for half an hour already, but once I was aware of them I
was understandably quite keen to fish them out. At this point, the third thing
happened in the shape of the appearance of a man called John: the owner of the
yurt. He didn’t seem remotely surprised to find a strange girl growing from a
tree in what was effectively his front garden. He noted my basket half-full
with blossom, introduced himself, asked if I was WWOOFing, wished me well and wandered off. It was just as well that
he didn’t stay to chat. I couldn’t have hidden the discomfort of the crawling
sensation over my chest for much longer.
One tree had taken me just under an
hour, I reckoned, and I moved happily along the path, stripping the chestnuts
as I went and eventually finding myself in an open field full of hay bales. Having
lost my watch to the nettle-strewn undergrowth, I had no idea what the time
was, but the sun was high overhead and I could feel its heat. My baskets were
heavy with pollen, my arms aching at the inside of my elbows, and the arches of
my feet were beginning to complain. I rested a moment against the nearest hay bale.
It was only a moment, because upon closer inspection it turned out to be a
hotel for a wide variety of mini-beasts. I wasn’t keen on a repeat of the
beetles-in-the-bra episode. Besides, I had expected the hay bale to be soft –
hay should be soft – but this was most definitely a scratchy straw bale, so I
set off back to the house. I still had no idea why Anne-Marie wanted the
flowers that I had collected, but I hadn’t collected enough to satisfy
her. Before I was to find out their
purpose, I was sent on two further expeditions to local chestnut trees.
Whatever she was going to use them for, she clearly needed them in immense
quantities.
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