Manna from heaven...

In the far back corner of the orchard in Normandie is a red raspberry patcfh. It was planted long before my time, and, with no help whatsoever from me, provides loads of red raspberries every autumn. In late winter we have someone mow down the canes, along with the rest of the pasture, and that's it for maintenance. Every year the patch moves slightly outward, forsaking a bit of its former territory in search of new soil. The other day I was back in the raspberry patch picking these wholly gratjs berries and trying to avoid the nettles. I had stooped down to raise a cane (not raise Cain) that was drooping to the ground with the weight of its fruit, when I spotted something that looked curiously like a walnut nestled in the grass. Not trusting my eyesight, I picked it up. It was a walnut. What the...? I looked up. That rather rough looking tree, partly overgrown by a wild hazel bush, now right next to the raspberry patch since its slow inevitable outward march, was in fact a walnut tree! And as I peered excitedly beneath its branches, I saw hundreds of walnuts, just waiting to be picked up.

How could I have missed the identification of this tree for 7 years? I felt totally idiotic. Yet, I knew how it had happened. In my old home of Indiana, 'English' walnut trees were practically nonexistent. So I never got familiar with them. This tree used to be out in the wildness of the pasture before the raspberries encroached on it, and glancing at it from afar, I thought it was some sort of European ash. Second, and this is truly ironic, at the opposite end of the Normandie property is a small walnut tree which has also been there since before my time. Every spring, we give this tree up for dead, because it is so slow to put out its leaves. And it hasn't seemed to grow at all, never mind blooming and bearing nuts. I've often made comments, when we have seen prolific untended walnut trees in Provence, that our little walnut was clearly unhappy in Normandie.

I had on my dirt-plastered but deep-pocketed pink gardening pants, which make me resemble nothing so much as a happy pink piglet who's been wallowing in the mud. I scampered around as excitedly as any squirrel, stuffing walnuts in my pockets. Wait till I showed Denis! The surprise of this shower of walnuts seemed so incredible to me--a girl from a climate much too rude for anything but acrid, uncrackable black walnuts. It was literally manna from heaven.

"Fresh" walnuts--which have just fallen from the tree--are prized in France for their sweet, slightly green, milky flavor. And French walnuts are much easier to crack than the ones we have in the States. They emerge obediently, often entire, when you gently crack their thin shells. A bowl of fresh walnuts, a wedge of very old Comté cheese, a sliced apple, and a glass of good red (or better, yellow Jura) wine...just add a fire crackling in the fireplace and life couldn't be any better!

October is of course the month of the harvest moon. It must affect me strongly, because--although I stop short of howling--I do suffer from a restless urge to...harvest at this time of year. This primal impulse seems to be hardwired into my brain, and every fall sends me racing about stocking up everything from winter squashes to fruit preserves. I check anxiously on the pumpkins gleaming orange in the grass far beyond the boundaries of the garden.
Will they have time to ripen fully before frost?

The wild blackberries on the berm at the back of the property taunt me with clusters of big sweet fruits defended by arching tangles of viciously thorned brambles. Only a bird could pick them with ease. I'll bear the scars of this harvest for a full two weeks!



In the slanting golden light of an autumn afternoon, the crimson-splashed pods of Borlotto pole beans gleam among their yellowing leaves. They are bulging with plump beans, some nearly dry already and some still in the fresh shell-out stage. These I'll use immediately in a delicous ragout. The remainder I'll leave to dry thoroughly in their pods in a big basket near the fireplace. When they're just a dessicated shadow of their former plump selves, I'll shell and store them. Then, some frigid winter evening, I'll put them to soak for soup the next day. Their overnight water bath will have miraculously restored their youthful turgor, reminding me of that sunny harvest afternoon. If only recovering my own youthful proportions were as simple as an overnight soak!

As any gardener knows, every gardening season begins full of promise: This will be the year of bountiful crops, of weeds eradicated the moment they dare poke their cotyledons out of the soil. Then, climate and weather conspire with the gardener's busy schedule to chip away at this ideal state of affairs. The thin filet beans which were so splendid last year? You look forward ardently to a repeat performance, only to find that this year, they yield only a few paltry handfuls. Meanwhile, the carrots that failed to sprout last season bravely burst forth their feathery tops in complete orderly rows, with not a mysterious blank in site.

In my garden, this was the year of the nuts. No thanks to me, the afore-mentioned walnuts as well as the hazelnut bushes we planted a few years ago bore bumper crops.This year, we had a scorchingly hot and absolutely dry April and May, followed by a nearly cold, rainy summer. Is this what nuts like? An absurd question, of course, as hazelnuts and walnuts are related only by our catchall English term of "nuts"--of which no equivalent exists in French except the curious "fruits secs" (dry fruits). "Nuts" do not--as far as I know--share the same cultural requirements. Yet, in midsummer, the hazelnut bushes bore bunches of young nuts encased in pretty frilled collars of tender green--for me one of the loveliest sights the garden has to offer. By late September, those lacy frills had turned brown and crisp, retracting to drop the nuts to the ground. The trick is to harvest the clusters of hazelnuts just before this happens--which I did.
A big basket loaded with these treasures was the result--plenty of hazelnuts to keep the family squirrel (me) munching throughout the winter.

With Normandy's rich soil and plentiful rainfall, one thing I'm always harvesting plenty of is weeds. My vengeance on the weeds is that I turn them into compost. Just desserts, don't you think? This fall, the compost pile is even more well-fed then usual. The cool, rainy summer meant that the buttercups--the bane of my gardening life in Normandy--had proliferated with untoward speed while my
back was turned. I spent endless hours ripping them fiercely from the ground and flinging them furiously onto a compost heap which stood as high as I.

Of course, Normandy is famous for apples. Now that I've gardened here, I know why. Apples here grow and bear monstrous crops with no human help whatsoever. Like most old houses in the region, ours has a number of ancient cider apple trees--varieties developed for pressing into the local fermented, nonsweet cider. These trees have a life force that is nothing short of incredible. One of ours seemed dead. But, since a big climbing rose used it as support, we simply cut off the top of the tree and left the trunk--which had only a strip of bark remaining, standing. Lo and behold, the spring after this drastic treatment, this seemingly dead trunk put out a new branch from its slender strip of bark. The next year, this zombie branched bloomed, and even bore a few fruits! In spite of the terrible spring drought that injured the blooming of many apple trees this year, more than one of our trees had branches literally bent to the ground with the weight of the fruit. We are drinking lots of apple juice, as I have in previous years put by enough apple jelly and sauce to last us until we die.

Of course, the last of the fall flowers are always the most poignant part of the harvest. My sweetpeas put forth a splendid last burst of bloom before collapsing into sudden exhaustion and drying up seemingly overnight. Their tender winged blossoms and jewelled colors seemed to invoke a strange inversion of spring with fall--like one of those autumn days when a combination of the angle of the sun and a certain humidity in the air could make you swear that it was the beginning rather than the end of the season. In the low rays of the afternoon sun, our asters were blanketed with late butterflies that seemed almost numerous than the blossoms.


Is there any pleasure at any price that can equal that of strolling among these masses of butterflies which have appeared in this particular patch of meadow due to my own efforts to provide for them? No matter how high-definition or massively proportioned, a flat-screen television offers an experience that is just that--flat--compared to the living scene I walked through that afternoon.

One of the most tenacious joys of the fall garden is the nasturtium. I have planted nasturtiums in this garden exactly once. Since then, I just pull them out where I don't want them to grow. During the height of summer, their common exuberance is overshadowed by the more refined beauties of roses, hydrangeas, and the like. But in late autumn, the nasturtiums are still a storm of bloom long after everything else has sunken into wintery oblivion.

Then, in the foreshortened days under increasingly gray clouds, the nasturtium blossoms seem to have distilled the very summer sun into the firey glow of their petals, which radiate like so many small reservoirs of summer light. Somehow, it always takes the menace of winter to make me realize the miracle of the nasturtium. I gather their generous profusion tenderly and gratefully and place them in an old orange marmelade jar that seems made for them. Just as I did last autumn.

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