Life in the sloe lane
Oct 27, 2021
3 minutes
John Lewis-Stempel
NOT so long ago, and not so far away, farming and foraging were twins. A farm was expected to provide in every way it could, whether the food was grown in a field, shot by a Churchill 12-bore or plucked from the wild trees and feral hedges. My mother, a hop farmer’s daughter, was dispatched hedge-wards to gather blackberries, sloes, hazelnuts, elderberries and rosehips as a matter of course in the autumns of the 1940s.
‘Picking hedgerow berries when Jack Frost visits is the forager’s maxim’
Today, the only popular vestige of the, inhabits almost every lane in Britain below the tree line.
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