What do you do with this year's profusion of wild fruit, alter you have made, your jams and jellies, after you've culled the hazelnuts, after you've got your quota of sloes for sloe gin, after and this is not a widespread practice, you've nibbled your fill of beechnuts? Simple: you leave the rest for the birds and animals, who really have the first rights to non cultivated species. And they still have many kinds we are not interested in - as food.
And there are fruits and seeds of trees on which Sean Dempsey of Kiltale, Dunsany, Meath, has his eye. For planting, only. He writes saying that he wants people, and particularly young people to be aware of the value to our country of growing more trees. And not just for forestry, you could assume from his letter, but for pleasure and the sense of wonder, to say nothing of the educational value of the experience of planting your seeds and watching a whole tree develop from it.
He has harvested, he says, "hundreds of thousands" of beechnuts from a tree near him. Last year's consignment is growing away healthily. He recommends the collection of birch seed, too. And from rowan berries of last year, crushes and put into a pot mixed with sand and compost, and almost forgotten, he has a thriving crop. He mentions also acorns, of course, Spanish chestnuts and "the useless but beautiful" horsechest nut. Children should be told how easy all this is, and schools could be drawn into schemes.
Where, you may ask, to put all the resultant trees? Good question. Coillte and other professional foresters have their own nurseries. However, anyone with any bit of space could always do, with something which performs so many functions. Schools could be centres for a national increase in respect for the right tree in the right place.
Now, quince again. A friend brings back from England a present of a jar of Quince and Rosepetal Jelly. Dried rosepetals can be seen and tasted in it. The label tells us that "Our Christian medieval folklore legend is that quince was the forbidden fruit of the garden of Eden." If Eve and then Adam bit into the quince as we know it today, they must have had teeth like a chainsaw, or at least a butcher's cleaver.