Right before my berry eyes

Musing over the dog days of summer, John LewisStempel delights in the scarlet haw- and fulsome sloe-laden hedgerows, as he stops to pluck glistening blackberries from brambles and indulges in the sweet burst of the abundant fruit

-  John Lewis-Stempel

AN August dog-day afternoon, the very earth panting. I went up the farm track with a pair of shears, thinking only of cutting off the arcing tendrils of bramble in the hedge that whip every car and tractor that passes, including the cabless Ferguson and its blood-clot-faced driver. I started snipping the barbed tentacles, then looked at the hedge: nothing tells you that your summer is shot so much as a 6ft-high hedge in the country. Overhead, the sky might be blue and blinding and, after rain, there can even come a brisk gust of oxygenating air carrying a simulacrum of spring. Then look at the hedge: the museum dust at its skirt, the abandoned spiders’ webs, the mildew on the oaks, the pox on the field maple, the coarseness of the aged, tired leaves, bowed with the effort of it all. Drool- ing and drooping senescently over everything, the white-beard flowers of wild clematis. The leaves of hazel yellowing, dying.

It seems human nature to hope for an extension of summer, a so-called ‘Indian summer’. But the writing is on the hedge: the ancient Celts knew this, regarding August as the first month of autumn, not the last month of summer. Because the fruits of autumn are already ripe in August: the haws the scarlet of lipstick, the sloes fulsome and grape-like, the dogwood berries mouse-eyed bright, and the elderberries hanging in purple bunches, as if about to be consumed by a Roman aristocrat lying on a couch. And the blackberries glittering. I plucked one, ate it. Then another, because one can never eat just one blackberry.