Living On Three Continents: Growing Ripe And Good
Susan Siddeley lives on her farm near Santiago, Chile, for a number of months every year. She also spends time every year in Toronto, Canada, and in Runswick Bay, a tiny fishing village on the Yorkshire Coast.
Here is the first in a new series of columns by Susan for Openwriting.
Imagine what delight was promised in Chile when I first arrived and saw blackberries growing wild in the most unexpected places.
Enormous bushes grew along the pathways of the Nature Parks east of Santiago, in country gardens and over barbed wire fences on scrubby hill slopes. It was a shock to learn that the plant was regarded as a scourge, an imported weed and smothering species which had taken over especially in the beautiful south of the country where native species sometimes struggled.
I don’t know what it was about blackberries that we loved when we were growing up in the West Riding. Was it their purple-crimson colour, their bulbous mini-spheres glistening in the sun, or the fact that the choicest always hung tantalisingly out of reach? Whatever, blackberries were a symbol -- picked out by John Keats and Methodist hymn writers -- of the best nature had to offer in the way of a free bush crop.
Blackberries were plentiful everywhere, but especially on the moors towards Lancashire and around Cawthorne, Gunthwaite Dam and Thurstonland. We went out every September with a paper bag -- plastic bags with their infinite possibilities were yet to come -- thrilled with the idea of having something to stew and serve with custard, fill a pie or make jam, when we returned.
With far less traffic, dust and fumes to sully their skins and shrink their volume, you only had to lift a leaf to find succulent fruit ripe for the picking. Today you must be well off the beaten path to find green bushes and dig ever deeper into their prickly middles to get at the berries.
Maybe now most people don’t regard blackberry picking -- ‘blagging’ -- a pleasure and are happy with the cultivated variety sold in punnets at the supermarket. Those perfectly matched, oversized, black specimens are possibly better than the wild variety since they don’t have so many tiny seeds to stick in your teeth. But, for me, it was always the picking of blackberries and the for-free-ness which lent tang to the taste.
This Christmas when I went to check on the tangled sprawl of ramblers which divides the farm garden from the back field, I found somebody had been overly zealous with a machete. Not just had things been cut back, something was missing -- the blackberry bush.
Given that the last few years the yield has been poor, pale and bird-pecked, not to mention overshadowed by earlier plums, peaches and nectarines growing nearby, I decided to let the matter drop, enjoy the giant pink hollyhocks growing in its place and join one of the 60 line-ups at the local super store. You could drive a bus up the impeccably well-stocked aisles of Chile’s ‘Jumbo’ supermarkets, so big and bright are they, with fruit and veg to match.
I took my dinky cello-wrapped box home and made a blackberry crumble. But, delicious and juicy as it was and purple as it stained our mouths, it lacked the lovely tartness the pick-your-own variety gives.
So another love bit the dust.
