3.7.24 – on no longer lying and a short history of gooseberries

in the garden

The cucurbits are yellowing, dinky, stringy. Too small. Too reluctant to grow further into the cold, wet summer. Maybe it’s not just the cold; maybe the manure in their beds have aminopyralids lingering, or maybe the ground under the manure is just too nutrient-poor after decades under gravel. But the cold feels the most obvious thing. It’s hardly got above 22C/71F in Glasgow so far this year, with most days ranging between 15C/59F and 18C/64F. Personally, I enjoy this kind of weather. I function at my best when the light isn’t too bright, when it’s not too hot to think. Though I do sometimes think, maybe just a couple degrees warmer would be nice? Might be good for the cucumbers, for the zucchini? But I am deeply reluctant to complain about it, to say that desire out loud. In other parts of the world, animals are falling dead out of the trees from heat (in Mexico City, in Dehli). People are dying. Rivers are drying up. Islands are being torn apart by hurricanes. Forests are burning. Land is unworkable, ungrowable. And not all of it is from fossil fuels (the private jets, the endless plastic production), but from the unconscionable mechanisms of colonialism, of capitalism: an endless stream of planes and their emissions bringing and dropping bombs, white phosphorous, tanks, diggers, snipers and their rifles, so much land moved for illegal mines, for palm oil plantations, for shrimp farming, for cattle rearing. To complain about a cooler-than-usual summer with plenty of rain feels wildly ungrateful, in the context of everything that is happening right now.

I made a promise to myself this year that I wouldn’t play along in small talk when people complain about the cold, or openly admire inappropriate heat that is creating drought conditions. Lying through my teeth about the weather has become second nature, especially here, in this country that loves to talk about the weather but never about what the weather means. Every time I’ve done it before, I’ve felt queasy, offering more silk for the cocoon of our complacency in watching the climate collapse around us. I can’t do it anymore. Every day I live with this dread that these might be the last years I hear the birds singing, or the bees mumbling in the foxgloves. I feel, so often, so powerless in the face of genocide and ecocide, pathetically shopping for wooden cutting boards or switching to glass containers to limit the uncountable masses of microplastics in my body and the bodies of everyone I love, in the ice of the Arctic, in the bottom-most silt of the darkest fathoms of the ocean. I want to scream every day. I can’t have another conversation where I pretend that the heat – which two summers ago killed so many trees in London and made living in these poorly-designed flats and new-build houses unbearable, don’t you remember? – is a great treat, that it’s fantastic Glasgow is hotter than Barcelona. I can’t pretend that this cool and grey summer isn’t a relief after many summers of wild fires in the Highlands, of the Science Centre roof melting off, of hosepipe bans and water shortages.

I sowed so many cucurbits because I was counting on a summer like the others, thinking maybe for all my dread and heat-induced migraines I might get some good fruit out of it at least. But I would rather not have that fruit at all if it means a summer more appropriate for this place. Anyway, I have the kale and other brassicas, which romp away no matter what the weather. I have lots of salad, which hasn’t had a reason to bolt. I have sweet peas that perfume the house in bud vases, and hot red nasturtium clambering through dwarf beans and lettuce. I have so many strawberries and raspberries, which have grown fat from the rain and nostalgically sweet from a long gentle ripening. I have garlic forming their heads underground, nearly ready to come up to cure in the cold frame. I have the biggest rhubarb I’ve ever seen in my life.

What I don’t have is the right to vote in this country tomorrow. If I could, I would be voting for the Scottish Greens, who are the only party in Scotland not just advocating for people and planet, but actively envisioning the kind of country Scotland could be if it was independent. If I was in England or Wales, I would be voting for the Green Party candidates there, whenever possible, because across the country the Greens and Scottish Greens are the only parties (and they are separate!) that will fight for policies that tax the obscenely rich, that protect the rights of trans people and queer people, that fight for sustainable infrastructure, that stop the sale of arms to Israel and support the recognition of Palestine, that would improve public transport, that would maybe bring us closer to a world of life, a world that is only prevented through the unethical wealth of a small few. We know Labour will win, but we don’t know by how much. Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us vote Green, we might have an opposition party or coalition that actually sits in opposition, that isn’t just the other side of the same right-wing, capitalist, queerphobic, earth-destroying coin.

The Gard’ner’s Kalendar – July

The first newsletter of every month this year will include an excerpt from gardener John Reid’s 1683 book The Gard’ner’s Kalendar, an addendum to his book The Scots Gard’ner.

Fallow ground as soon as the crop comes off. Prune and purge all standard trees. Ply, nail, prune, and dress your wall-trees. Pull up suckers and weeds. Haw and water where needful. Inoculate fruit-trees, shrubs, rare greens, and flower-trees; increase the same by laying. Clip your hedges after rain. Suffer such herbes and flowers to run to seed as you would save, cutting the rest a handful from the ground.

Sow turneep, radish, lettice, onion, cole-flower, cabbage, and coleworts in the full moon. Near the end sow beets, spinage, &c. You may plant strawberries, violets, camomile. Lay July-flowers. Plant their seedlings. Slip and set hypaticas, bears-ears, couslips, helibors, &c. Take up bulbous and tuberous ones that are dry in their stalks (if you mind to change their places) and keep till September, but some should be set immediately.

Supply voids with potted annualls. Lay grass and gravell. Make cherrie and raspberrie wine, &c.

Prevent the bees’ later swarms. Kill drons, wasps, &c.

Garden Dishes and Drinks in Season

            Beets and many pot-herbes and sweet herbes.

            Beet-card, purslain, lettice, endive, &c.

            Cabbage, cole-flower, scorzonera, beet-rave, carrot, radish, turneep, peas, beans, and kidnees, artichocks, strawberries, rasps, currans, gooseberries, cherries, plumes, summer pears and aples.

            Cyder, metheglin, and other wines.

One day in July 2017, my partner came home from work with nearly two kilos of fat, green-veined, translucent gooseberries. One of his colleagues had a plant that had produced far too much for her to keep up with, and I had recently mentioned being entirely unfamiliar with them. It was, I think now, the worst way to have been introduced to the gooseberry because I had no idea that I would never find them in such an outlandish, wonderful quantity ever again. I made a pie with most of them, Nigel Slater’s Gooseberry Pie in Tender Volume II; it turned our mouths inside out with sourness the first day, but mellowed to a pleasing tang through the week. The rest I think I made into jam, which I ate obsessively on toast. In subsequent Julys, I have made the gooseberry pie as often as I could, trying to recreate that first addictively sour attempt, but have been forced to incorporate blackcurrants and redcurrants when there are never enough punnets of fresh gooseberries. Now I have two of my own bushes, and a jostaberry (a cross between the gooseberry and the blackcurrant), and hope not to wait many more years before I have my own outlandish glut to turn into more pies, more jam.

Gooseberries have a long history in the cottage gardens of Scotland. Probably introduced in the Middle Ages, they would have been fairly widespread by the time John Reid wrote about them in 1683. In an era before sugar was readily available, their versatility in the kitchen was useful. Reid lists many ways to eat them in The Scots Gard’ner, from “baking, boyling, and sauces”, to gooseberry wine (made in the same manner as cherrie-wine), to gooseberry brandy, made like cherrie-brandie, in a bottle half-filled with gooseberries and half with brandy, “sometimes jumbled a little, and in a moneth’s time is fit for drinking.” He also includes directions for a specific gooseberry liqueur:

“Gather your gooseberries ere they be too ripe, and for every three pounds of stampt fruit, use a chopin of water, and a pound of sugar; steep them twenty four houres, then strain them; put the liquor into a vessel close stopt a fortnight or three weeks; then draw it off if you find it fine, other-wayes suffer it longer; and if not yet fine, rak it. It’s usuall to make it thus unboyled, because it contracts a brown colour in boyling.”

In the early 19^th century, gooseberries were commonplace in the gardens of the working class, alongside currants. In my previous neighbourhood of Langside in Glasgow, the old village was locally famed for its gooseberries and apples, which grew in the kailyards of the weavers. In a Glasgow Herald article from 1888, Dulsie (a pen name) described the village as it was in the mid-1800s, and how “in July and August, the villagers drove a brisk trade in gooseberries and apples (especially on Sundays, I am sorry to say) with the crowds of Glasgow lads and lassies. Luckily, there were no public-houses, so that little noise ensued, business being done in  a half-subdued and orderly manner. However, as the crop was sold, the villagers returned to complete decorum, and felt good enough to attend church during the winter.”

Until the early 20^th century, varieties of gooseberry were numerous. In an appendix to his 1813 On Scottish Gardens and Orchards, Patrick Neill listed 25 varieties grown in Scotland, broken up in categories of green (3), white (2), yellow (11), and red (9). Of these, Crystal (a white variety) had been cited by John Reid in 1683 as particularly good for wine. Some are still possible to grow today (Golden Drop, Sulphur, White Lion, and Ironmonger all available to buy) but this diversity was decimated in the early 1900s by the spread of American gooseberry mildew fungus, to which the European gooseberry had no defence. More resilient and mildew-resistant varieties were created by crossing the European gooseberry with American wild gooseberries. Now, most of us grow the modern disease-resistant Hinnomaki varieties, Invicta, or Careless.

Also early in the century, the United States federally banned the cultivation of gooseberries because they were an intermediary host for white pine blister rust. Though the federal ban was lifted in 1966 and most states and towns have allowed their regulations to lapse, in places where white pine trees are important many restrictions remain in place. Consequently, the gooseberries I’m talking about (ribes uva-crispa) are for Americans the stuff of fairy tales, probably only familiar from Snow White’s gooseberry pie in the 1937 film, despite there being numerous wild varieties indigenous to North America. Instead, the word “gooseberry” in the US usually refers to the cape gooseberry or physalis, a completely unrelated fruit.

That first outlandish quantity tasted in 2017