The sort of present you don't expect in this country today: a box with more than a dozen ripe, lush peaches, grown not only in Ireland, but outdoors in one of the least favourable years for a long time. Outdoors, mind, and not only were the peaches absolutely top class, but even the green leaves of the tree to set them off, were utterly unblemished. And peach trees are subject to various maladies. The recipients, who had once owned a similar tree (a Peregrine), knew that the lovely white flesh of these beauties can only be enjoyed with a bib tied well around your neck. In fact, if it wasn't so uncomfortable, hygiene would have you eat the peach while bending over the hand basin.
Peregrine is the peach. To grow it outside, the right wall facing in the right direction, is required. It's all in the books, but it takes the experience and the master hand to bring it to perfection. The name of the donors cannot be given in case they were raided; for as well as peaches they brought a mighty basket of plums of two kinds. They have lost, this year, a good deal of their soft fruit to the grey squirrel. You've seen depictions of a squirrel gnawing a nut held in its paws. Well, they do the same with strawberries, though the gnawing-time is brief indeed.
Another friend showed her visitors around her apple trees. A lovely one, pink as the peach, but in stripes, was just reaching perfection. Forget the name, unfortunately; but are we being spoiled by the ease with which the richest of fruits can be whisked by plane to our shops from the ends of the earth? Cherries used to be mostly from England and France. English cherries seem to be dying out, and when the French season is over, we go back to the same fruit from California or Peru or some other South American country.
Some oldsters will still remember when their parents or country cousins could rattle off the names of perhaps a dozen good apples, both eaters and cookers. And perhaps in Armagh the tradition still keeps a foothold. In today's shops you have a choice of a few of which the most charitable thing you can say is that they don't have much flavour. Hard as rocks, some of them. Time marches on, and you'd be right to say that we should be grateful for what we have, even if it is produced half a world away. But for years nothing has been savoured as those county Meath peaches. Y.