You never see it happening, but every year there appears a carpet of unripe shells under the several hazel trees, and the white/green shells are all marked by teeth and/ or beaks. Not one nut survives to become brown, ripe and delicious. Half the contents are still there. In his book Nature Detective, Hugh Falkus shows a photo of "Hazel nuts chiggled [dictionary doesn't help] by woodmouse or long-tailed fieldmouse." In the palm of a hand lie apparently empty half hazel-nut shells. Our own Meath ones are all green and there are deep marks which look like the work of a bird's beak, or a nibbling grey squirrel of which there is no shortage. So year after year not one ripe nut for the humans. All opened from the top.
However. It was a marvellous sunny Sunday, and the most spectacular sight was of clouds of butterflies, many tortoiseshells and even more exotic wings, rising over a tall yellow buddleia; hundreds all told if you counted in the lesser creatures. More homely sight, the one apple tree, a John Downey crab, glowing with its red and yellow crop.
Purple is a great colour of autumn: the sun shone on a massively berried elder. Jam, jelly or wine? For the birds, the Leycesteria or pheasant bushes which grow in numbers as the birds eat the berries, purple again, and evacuate the seed here and there. It can be a nice, trim, colourful bush with minimum attention. In odd abandoned corners it can grow to huge proportions, sprawling. Birds other than pheasants obviously feed well on it. Good rowan berries; strange bottle-shaped hips on a rose tree. A day of colour under a constant sun. Not much sign of sloes, though.
If purple livens the scene, green is still everywhere. Even the American oaks, which turn early, are still green to the tips. A touch of early autumn in the ash grove, where a ring of mushrooms, nearly two feet across, were at an advanced stage, tatty, so left. Harvest time, yet hardly a brownish leaf to be seen, except in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, where some of the chestnut trees show a rusty edge.
The conkers have a long way to go before they become a respectable size for the schoolboy game - if it still exists as an autumn sport for those under, say, 14. But the day was pure summer with just the kindly hint of autumn. Last Sunday. Remember? Y