Memories of wonderful jamming sessions
Worcesterberries – on one of my earlier childhood explorations I found them growing at the top of the steep brae that ran through our small dairy farm.
They were behind the “thistle tree” (a large holly) that had earlier seized my astonished and semi-horrified attention. Permanently at war with all things that pricked and stung, this tree was clearly the last word in plants to be avoided.
But, higher up, once you had whacked your way through the high nettles, there they were – dark red, almost black, and hanging from the prickly green canopy beside and above me – berries bursting with sweetness. Day after day I gorged myself on them.
“Oh yes, I had rather forgotten about them” my mother had said “Worcesterberries – Jock Sutherland up at the Foundry Cottage gave their roots to me when you were just a little baby. They are a cross between a gooseberry and a blackcurrant”.
I ate so many that my tummy hurt – once I was spectacularly sick; but that is not for a column such as this – and for the next few years I would impatiently wait for the late summer when the berries started to darken and sweeten.
Ever hungry as a child – and with parents whose meals and mealtimes regime was, to say the least, eccentric – from a very young age I was an expert at foraging for food.
“Haven’t you had your lunch?” – in fact it was only this autumn that a friend pointed out that I was sampling much of the vegetable and fruit in the garden that he was proudly showing me. Hastily I apologised and explained that it was all due to the way I was brought up.
“I wonder…” I said to myself five or so years ago, when I was driving through Tain’s industrial estate. I stopped the car, looked about me, and slightly guiltily (for my brother owns it now) climbed up that same brae.
Yes, there they were – however, not as I remembered them. Thin weedy, light-starved shadows of the cornucopia of yesteryear; but all the same, I snapped off a twig or two; they might just take as cuttings. Later I stuck them in the ground at the back of our house at Edderton. Then, like my mother, I rather forgot about them.
Last September, having let the Edderton house for a period, I decided to put it on the market. And bidden by an old signal from my taste buds and stomach, I remembered and thought that I would just take a quick look at the far end of the garden.
Well! Just as if the decades had shot backwards, and my shiny red and green first Meccano set had been given to me all over again, there were Worcesterberries galore! Big healthy bushes covered with fruit, my cuttings had taken all right. By auto-reflex my hand went to bush, and then to mouth.
“Worcesterberry Black Gooseberry, which is really a currant species grow in same style as Gooseberries. This variety produces huge crops of small dark red berries which are sweet enough to eat straight from the plant or make the most wonderful jam. Very disease resistant perfect for those fed up with gooseberry mildew…”
I quote from the “Perennials of Distinction” online catalogue – and I think that this is a very fair description, including the point that the Worcesterberry is in fact not a cross between a gooseberry and a currant. That, and the jam – it certainly is quite delicious.
In November I popped up to Edderton and took a second generation of Worcesterberry cuttings and carefully placed them in my Tain vegetable patch. Looking at them now, they look healthy enough and I have every hope of seeing the first green leaves appear in spring. All being well, there is another link in the chain.
How many people grow gooseberries and the like today? I wonder – but certainly in the old days many a garden would have had them. Indeed I have a second row of cuttings hopefully settling in – these ones come from a gnarled and ancient gooseberry bush growing beside a ruined croft house near Tain.
The bush is an old friend; the source of autumn snacks over the years; and I didn’t think that the owner would mind me taking a quick snip or two.
It’s always a good idea to keep secateurs in your pocket – and blackcurrant and gooseberry cuttings are the easiest things in the world.
I wonder where Jock Sutherland’s family are now? If they would like the honour returned – a cutting, from a cutting, from a cutting from the bush that grew from the root Jock gave my mother – then I would be more than happy to oblige.
