WHAT a wonderful show now of all those flowering trees, perhaps most noticeable in mass in suburbia. Pinks and whites and blossom laid on blossom. One of the finest of the whites is the cherry plum, called by Herbert l Edlin in The Tree Key, the Asiatic cherry plum. It is one of the beauties of suburbia that produces lovely fruit. Last year was the greatest. Edlin tells us that the orchard plum, prunus domestica, came about as a hybrid of that same cherry plum and the European blackthorn prunus spinoea.
And surely the blackthorn, not in gardens but throughout the country, in hedges, in odd spots in field corners, in land despised for almost anything else, is the real king. There are parts of Clare, in memory, which are made even more glorious by seas of the white blossom. You meet it now in hedges, in odd spots along a river where a bird, perhaps, had dropped the stone of a sloe. Or maybe a child has spat it out after tasting its bitter astringent flesh.
The fruit is generally rejected, though not by jam makers or jelly makers. It adds piquancy to apple jelly in particular, and, its peak is perhaps in the liqueur, sloe gin. Only quince competes with it in this class. In recent days, in this eastern part, the white blossom is to the fore. Will we be lucky enough to get, this year as we did last year, and as was so pridefully announced, for the first time in decades, sloes (slight exaggeration, but only slight) as big as damsons?
For practical purposes, it makes, what is, to man and beast, an impenetrable hedge. Keeping in and keeping out. The thorns are long and painful and potentially poisonous. And yet, and yet! The blackthorn stick of the more popular kind, the stick sold in tourist shops, is often a cod, a deception. It is ostentatiously painted black. In fact, the bark of the blackthorn varies in colour. A specimen, cut long ago from a hedge in county Limerick, just by the roadside, is as near as dammit to brown. And it was a blackthorn. The spines are the proof.
Some people go to great lengths to bend curved handles to the blackthorn. Better a natural nob from the root. it is not meant to be a polite walking stick. (Do the District Inspectors of the RUC still carry them? Or, indeed are there still District Inspectors? They used to be slim, dressy sticks.
But just now, the emphasis is on the emerging white blossom. And even in a neglected corner of a field, the small pokey branches and the light blossom are among the finest sights of Spring. The lone thorn in the middle of the field, carefully ploughed around? That's another day's work.