Summer and Autumn
The natural rotation of the earth around the sun, affecting the amount of daylight experienced, has been the basis of the astrological calendar for thousands of years. Within this, the moon’s own path around the earth provides another physically identifiable marker for events.
The astrological calendar causes some issues for the orderly mind because the Earth actually takes 365¼ days to traverse the sun and so requires a Leap Year every fourth year to bring the calendar into alignment. This inconvenient truth also causes the exact date of the solstices and equinoxes to vary. We have 13 lunar cycles a year but only 12 calendar months.
These variations in the start point and duration of each season make it difficult to consistently compare statistics for a particular season from one year to the next. In the early to mid- 20th century the meteorological seasons were introduced in which Spring is defined as March, April and May; Summer (June, July and August); Autumn (September, October and November) and Winter as December, January and February. Nature is rarely this orderly! These meteorological seasons are based on temperature and spotting the earlier appearance of wildlife is often cited as evidence of climate change.
I finished the first part of this subject in May so as we move into June we are, according to the Met Office, starting summer. Yet the Summer Solstice on 21or 22 June is, according to the astrological calendar the middle of summer. This is probably the point at which these two methods of naming seasons feels most out of kilter. Sadly, the days do start to get shorter from the Summer Solstice but there should still be plenty of warmer days to come.
Having finished Spring with the flowers of the Elder tree, the Summer Solstice, for me, means picking the flowers of the Lime Tree. These enormous trees are frequently found growing in avenues, a deliberate statement planting rather than the more haphazard countryside hedgerows. There will be slight variations in the flowering time depending on location, there is around a three-week picking window. As with elderflowers you are looking for open flowers that are still pale in colour and a sunny day is best for picking. It is easiest to snip the flower off with its leaf, but you can discard that later as it is the flower that has the fragrance. In France the blossom is known as Tilleul and is widely drunk as a tisane with sedative qualities. You will find it in most herbal teas sold here to aid sleep. Once you have picked your blossoms you need to lay them out on a tray and put them in an airing cupboard, or similarly warm place, to dry. Once dried you can store them to last the year. One advantage of them having often been planted in avenues is that it is easy to place beehives there during the flowering period as the honey it produces is also exquisitely but gently scented. A small spoonful in a tisane is perfect. I have however, rarely seen this single variety honey sold in this country.
Whilst on the subject of honey, our Natural History GCSE should definitely include bees. I have already mentioned their crucial role of pollination, but it appears that a wider understanding of what beekeeping entails is needed to clarify the misunderstanding that beekeepers “lock up their bees and steal their food”. This was the explanation I received as to why vegans do not eat honey. This GCSE can’t come soon enough for my liking.
Summer
To continue our progression through the year, if spring is all about blossom and green shoots, I feel that summer has arrived when we see ripe strawberries, the first in a succession of soft berries. I am of course talking about wild food, and it has to be said that the wild strawberries take a little longer to ripen than the cultivated ones I grow, which I grow in open ground without protection or heat. The strawberries grown in growbags in greenhouses are now available pretty much year-round but certainly by April. My outdoor strawberries ripen in June with the wild strawberries just a couple of weeks behind.
One of the biggest differences between wild and cultivated fruit is the size, wild strawberries are tiny, and it would take a lot to fill a bowl. They do however have an exquisite flavour which led to a hybridization between wild and cultivated strawberries to produce perpetual fruiting alpine varieties, mostly French, such as Mara des Bois or Gariguette. These produce larger fruit than wild strawberries although considerably smaller than modern varieties of cultivated strawberries.
If you have ever eaten wild raspberries, which may be yellow or red in colour, you will know that along with the slightly smaller size comes the problem that a higher percentage of each berry consists of the pips. I usually sieve them to remove the pips and eat just the purée. This might be one reason why blackberries began to be cultivated; they are certainly larger and less “pippy” but personally I would never buy them when the wild fruit is so widely available and free. Foraging seems to add to the enjoyment.
But if there is one berry that demonstrates to me how cultivation often misses the flavour element, it is wild bilberries. The cultivated version is called a blueberry, and I am sure you will be familiar with them as they are considered a “superfood”. Flavour wise, I consider blueberries bland, but the effort expended in back-breaking picking of wild bilberries will be more than repaid when you taste them. It takes a lot to fill a tart, but for me it is the highlight of summer eating. If I have only picked a small amount, I would instead put them into muffins where you will still appreciate the difference in flavour. The traditional date on which bilberry picking starts is Lammas Day (1st August) although nowadays I would start looking around mid-July. Bilberries are a moorland berry, which used to be picked by schoolchildren during the summer holidays to help pay for their school clothes when they returned in the autumn. The window for picking depends on the altitude, you could start on the lower slopes at the start of the holidays and work your way up. Locally, I notice that the bilberry bushes begin at the height where bracken, and most trees, stop.
The allure of seasonal eating comes in large part from the knowledge that we will have to wait another year to experience the flavour again. The foods of summer, once here, are usually around for only a short time to be quickly succeeded by another seasonal delight. Seamus Heaney’s poem about blackberry picking encapsulates both the excitement and frustration of these short “seasons”.
Blackberry-Picking
By Seamus Heaney
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
Preservation
Preserving food began as a necessary safeguard for when the weather turned and fresh food was in short supply. It is also about not wasting food in times of plenty. You should notice that after the fast succession of summers fruits and vegetables come those that will more readily store. Root vegetables are often lifted from the ground before it becomes too frozen to dig and stored in dark dry conditions. To preserve crops for longer you need to exclude those conditions which were essential to their growing: chiefly light, warmth and water. The exclusion of moisture helps prevent rot, so drying is probably the oldest method of preservation that we have. Other techniques were learnt by trial and error, but error could cost not just the crop but also lives. Today we have sound scientific research to guide us, and you ignore those rules at your peril. Preservation is not just cooking to transform a food, although of course many of the preserved forms, such as jams and pickles, became even more popular than the fresh.
The availability of domestic freezers was a real game changer. I am old enough to remember that before they existed refrigerators contained a small “ice box” sufficient to store ready frozen food, such as a block of ice cream or a packet of frozen peas, for a very limited time. Before refrigerators we had larders – north facing rooms without windows, where food could be kept cool (but not frozen). Once we had domestic deep freezers it was possible to freeze your home-grown or foraged fresh food surplus, but soon people also filled it with ready-frozen convenience food like ice cream and pizza. This double-edged sword of convenience lies at the crux of why understanding how food grows in nature helps us avoid the pitfalls of scientific advances. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be.
Autumn
Autumn is a relatively short period during which the day length shortens rapidly, and we are filled with a squirrelling instinct. Harvesting and preserving make it a very busy time.
As we move into Autumn the fruits available in the hedgerows were historically preserved to provide much needed vitamin C in the winter. During WWII the government encouraged people to forage for rosehips, one of the riches sources of vitamin C, and published a recipe for turning them into a syrup to consume over winter.
Syrup is the method also often employed with Elderberries (this syrup is known as Elderberry Rob). Elderberries are beneficial to the immune system, and this syrup was particularly valued as a remedy for coughs and colds. The high sugar content in syrups is what helps prevent the development of mould, so don’t be tempted to reduce it. Sugar was rationed in wartime so there was little worry that people would consume too much but a little goes a long way. The essential method was described for Elderflower Cordial in part 1and recipes giving quantities should be easy to find.
Hedgerow stone fruit such as wild damson (bullace) and sloes are often steeped in alcohol to make a winter liqueur.
Nuts
A most important category of wild food to store, from a health point of view, are nuts. Hazel has been historically important not only for the nuts it provides but also as a flexible building material so you will find it growing everywhere. The quantity and size of hazelnuts vary considerable from year to year. When there are enough nuts to go around not only for squirrels and other wildlife but also for humans to pick, as has happened in 2025, it is described as a “Mast Year”. Mast is a generic term for the fruit, nuts and seeds of trees and bushes and it of course includes not only those considered good to eat by humans but also by animals. Beech Mast, for example, is eaten by pigs and there were (and still are in some places) rights to graze at this time of year. You may have noticed an exceptional number of acorns this year too. It is not strictly true that all “mast” will have a bumper year at the same time and there seem to be different cycles for different foods. So, we might say it has been a mast year for X rather than generally. Unusually prolific harvests occur either because the plant takes the opportunity presented during especially favourable conditions or has been shocked by adverse conditions. It aims to increase its number, a basic technique for survival.
In our current climate, Britain does not usually produce nuts of the size and quality found in France and Italy, two of our main suppliers. However, this might well be something that changes if temperature continue to rise. There are very few commercial growers of hazelnuts and walnuts in the UK, and as far as I know, none of Sweet Chestnuts although a friend who lives on the south coast of Devon has a wonderful avenue of mature Sweet Chestnut trees which do produce some nuts large enough to roast.
Most nuts also provide oil, walnuts more than hazels, but chestnuts virtually none at all, although they are ground to provide flour in Spain and Italy. Because of the oil they have a shortish lifespan before the nuts begin to taste rancid. However carefully they have been stored, by the end of winter, they are no longer good to eat and so unless we import from the other side of the world, we ought not to be eating them in spring and summer. It’s a real bugbear of mine when I read recipes for summer dishes that contain them. Remember when a bowl of nuts was a Christmas treat rather than unhealthy chocolates!
Fungi
Now we come to the star of Autumn – fungi. They deserve that accolade for many reasons. Firstly, because they have already provided so many medical solutions, particularly in mental health but they have so much potential to solve numerous environmental problems, we have really only just started to envisage what they could do. Secondly, as if that weren’t enough, they are very good for our gut health and the more varieties you eat the better. Third, although some have been cultivated, most of the best tasting ones still elude this. Wild fungi really are the best example of why wild food should still be part of our diet. Last, and most importantly as far as this GCSE is concerned, they have so much to teach us about the natural world. If you are interested to learn more about them it really is a lifetime interest. There are no shortcuts.
My suggestion for those just starting out is to concentrate first on recognising the characteristics of a genus rather than the specific members. In the same way that we may have many members of a family who all share a surname this is the first step in identification. For example, the Agaricus family is the one that includes field mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, and is the most frequently cultivated type that we often buy in the shops. They have gills, initially pink but darkening to brown, a central stem and the cap may be white or brown. None of the family is deadly poisonous but it is responsible for most illness, probably because people think they can easily recognise it. The one that most often causes upset stomach, cramps and sweating is Agaricus xanthodermus, commonly known as a Yellow Stainer. Agaricus arvensis, the Horse Mushroom, might also display some yellow colouration yet this is one of the most delicious, and harmless of the family. It’s important to be able to distinguish them. So, my second step would be to find out which of a family that you are studying is poisonous and make sure you know how to spot them.
The Amanita family includes many poisonous, often deadly members of which the most common is Amanita phalloides, The Death Cap. The distinctive characteristic of this family is a volva at the base of the stem, which may be large and bag-like or may show only as a rim. It is vital to check the base of fungi, if you were just to cut off the stem you might miss the most vital clue. This family includes Amanita muscaria, aka Fly Agaric, the one most frequently found illustrated in childrens’ books with its red cap and white spots. Although poisonous there are thoughts now that in microdoses it could help with mental illness.
Once you have learnt some key families you will understand what the parts are called and be able to follow a more systematic approach to identification. Be warned – if you start trying to identify just by looking at photographs you will soon find that there are many possibilities. A critical piece of the jigsaw will be what the fungi is growing alongside, i.e. its habitat. Some varieties, e.g. Leccinum versipelle and Leccinum scabrum, Orange Birch Bolete and Brown Birch Bolete respectively, are synonymous with a particular tree to the extent that it is part of their name, but oak and beech trees are favoured by many fungi. Hydnum repandum, the delicious Hedgehog Fungus which has spikes rather than gills, is often found growing with holly. However, there is a lot more holly that doesn’t have any nearby! Perhaps the fungus is fussier about the soil than is the holly? Certainly, the underlying rock will have an impact; and one side of a hedge might always be more productive than the other.
If this sounds confusing, I hope that it also illustrates why I find fungi such a fascinating thing to study. If it was easy to understand they could probably all be cultivated, but that is far from the case.
The fungi season is abruptly terminated with the first frosts, which depending on where you live might occur between the second half of October and the second half of November. This, for me, signals the start of Winter although, there are always exceptions to any rule. In the fungi world, Lepista nuda and Lepista saeva, Wood and Field Blewits respectively, will continue after a frost when there are very few other fungi around. Some, such as the much prized, although very rare, Morel prefers to fruit in Spring.
John Keat’s Ode to Autumn which begins “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” is as good a summary of the season as any.
With Winter nature takes a rest, as critical to plants as it is to humankind, and without which the natural lifecycle cannot continue. I’ll leave you with a recipe by the late chef and forager Antonio Carluccio which shows how the addition of just a few dried wild porcini (Boletus edulis) can keep the flavour of wild mushrooms going through the winter.
Porcini-Style Mushroom Sauce
If you can find some cultivated shiitake mushrooms their texture is similar to porcini and they are particularly adept at absorbing the dried porcini flavour.
Serves 6
¼ oz dried porcini mushrooms
12oz button mushrooms
8oz shiitake mushrooms
3 tbsps extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove garlic
2 tbsps chopped flat leaf parsley
1 oz butter
4 fl oz double cream
salt
freshly ground black pepper
3½ oz freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Cover the dried mushrooms with lukewarm water and leave to soak for at least 30 minutes. Lift the mushrooms out of the water and squeeze well. Strain the soaking liquid through a sieve containing a sheet of kitchen paper to filter out any dirt.
Heat the oil in a large frying pan and add chopped onion and crushed garlic, cook until golden brown and then add the reconstituted mushrooms and chopped parsley. Stir together and then add the filtered water from soaking the porcini. Turn up the heat and cook until all the water has evaporated.
Meanwhile slice the button mushrooms and the caps of the shiitake mushrooms. Add these to the pan together with plenty of salt and pepper. Cook gently for 10 minutes until all the liquid the mushrooms shed has simmered away.
Now add the butter and cream and cook at maximum heat until the cream has reduced by half.
Toss the sauce with drained, freshly cooked tagliatelle and the grated parmesan cheese.
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