ONE of my earliest Christmas memories is of having a large bowl of hazelnuts on the dining-room table, complete with a pair of shiny nutcrackers. At no other time of the year would those nutcrackers be seen. My first taste of salted peanuts, from a tin, was also at Christmas – when I was five or six years of age. Nuts have, therefore, always reminded me of the Yuletide season. Yet there is a lot more to them than this.
Nut trees should be far more widely grown. Most gardeners, though, think of them as exotic and unsuitable for the British climate; or they believe they’re