49 Farmer or Botanist

The raspberries had to be pruned, the fruit picked, the jam made and I had a fulltime job as well. Picking was always the best. It was a great time for thinking while being enveloped in the sharp almost clinical scents of slightly crushed raspberries. We had several raspberry varieties that all felt and smelt different.

Maybe Chilcotin is best. It has those bright red acid fruits that brighten up the senses when you pop one in and squirt the juices over your tongue. It is so acid that it takes the zinc coating off trellis wires, and it makes magic jam. We propagated it initially because it is from Alaska and might have a little more cold tolerance than other lines. Our place is cold.

Maybe Willamette is best too, but its flavour is more for the less committed raspberry eater. I like it best even though it’s from Oregon where she met leg problems. I know some Americans are strange but among the label notes on their red wine bottles might be “Willamette and blackcurrant scents in a light tannin background”. Flavour-wise it’s then down scale through Glen Clova to bottom out with boring fruits like those on Camby; pink water held around fine particles of sand.

The best thing about picking is that afterwards the fruit can be morphed into numbers that can then merge and interact with others in a computer database. There they grow into graphs, forecasts for yields and above all into excuses for not getting better yields. Only when the fruits are off the canes and categorised and weighed, computerised, and in tidy boxes freezing in the fridges do they really become real and realise their full glory. Those ephemeral little red blobs become part of a bigger picture probing towards the meaning of life.

By contrast pruning is just boring, competing with weeding and mulching for the most boring prize. Even whitewashing rocks or digging holes is better. But if there’s a lot to think about those activities are manageable. I find that I have my best conversations while pruning. I get into serious and deep discussions, even arguments with dead people, the prime minister, God (same thing I suppose), my family members and un-people that bubble up from old dreams.

Remarkably they occasionally come up with good points I would never have thought of. I suspect that solitary confinement in a darkened cell for a couple of weeks might not be so bad if they all came along. Though after two weeks they might start to run out of things to talk about and I might have to say too much. I hate talking.

She wanted me to take photographs of her wild plant discoveries and talk about her identifications using the glossy botanical books. Her idea was to identify and dry and press the specimens then put them and the photographs into a book with display pages. She drew a map of the bits of the farm where she had found plants and added a grid reference system. This was going to be page 1 in the book.

It was starting to look like a big project to me. Putting G12 or A5 next to a dried plant or photo meant you were going to want to return to that place and check it out over a few years. This didn’t seem like stamp collecting or bird spotting. With stamp collecting all you do is find the stamp, stick it in the book and forget about it, unless you wanted to brag to someone about having that stamp. My dad had a Penny Black but he never told anybody which seemed to make the owning part pointless. The same applies to birds. Once you see a bird and tick it off in your list or spotters book that is the end of the exercise because the bird has flown away. The bragging rights had been cemented in by the tick.

A plant on a map grid was inviting trouble. Your identification could be checked by others. You could never brag because an expert might be listening and say you were wrong. You would look stupid. That didn’t worry her. My photos of things like the common fringed lily Thysanotus tuberosus looked good though and it was starting to seem I at least could have some bragging rights as a very amateur Botanical Photographer one day. The farm was developing a new dimension.