May

Shoots and leaves

Appears in

A Cook’s Year in a Welsh Farmhouse

By Elisabeth Luard

Published 2011

About

THE FIRST DAYS OF MAY bring spring all in a rush.

We’ve had a hard winter – the woodland’s young oak trees in particular dislike wet feet – but the summer, say the forecasters, will be dry. Will, relieved that the grass is beginning to grow, is of the same opinion.

‘Oak before ash, in for a splash,’ he says, waving his hand at the bare branches on the topped-out ash tree. ‘Ash before oak, we’re in for a soak.’

I take a more Mediterranean view of what’s in store. The vine in the glass passage has produced an unusually large crop of infant grapes. Grape blossoms form on new growth in little pollen-dusted bunches at the same time as the vine puts on leaf, so are hard to spot beneath the greenery. Exuberant vine flowering in May, in my experience, indicates panic fruiting, a plant’s reaction when survival is threatened, a state well known to those who grow food plants on marginal land in extreme conditions.