As I sit writing at my laptop I look out of my window at a hazelnut tree, of the wild variety, already laden with catkins - plump and ready to open when the first warm spell comes along! And this is autumn, not spring. Only a few weeks ago that same tree was daily host to a whole flock of bluetits, wildly excited, flitting from branch to branch clearly gorging on something - would these have been the new leaf buds they were enjoying so much? Or the embryo catkins? I fear the latter, because the catkins seem a little thinly spread this year.
In my young day catkins were harbingers of spring, both hazel catkins and pussy willow, along with primroses, wood anemones, bluebells. And a few months later as we played in the woods and fields around us we would pick the nuts and crack them open in our teeth and eat them there and then.
Those catkins now outside my window remind me that nature is certainly confused with the new weather patterns that seem to be emerging.
When I was a child nuts were a commercial crop in Kent, the Garden of England. Are they still?Last night I ate some hazel nuts out of a packet - organic of course, but sadly not home grown. The squirrels eat all ours before they have ripened! I read the packet as I munched. Imagine my horror. They were grown in Turkey, packaged in Italy (for some reason the packet tells me this includes the Vatican City), shipped to London and then to our local supermarket. Oh dear I won't buy those again. And I thought I was careful about reading packets. Not careful enough. All those freight miles - all that energy. No wonder the world is in a mess.
Nuts!!
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