Aronia

As I emerge blinking into the middle stage of my life, firmly ensconced in children, career and suburban householding, I find myself increasingly aware of the oversized role “Naya Nuki: Girl Who Ran” by Ken Thomasma (see prior post) has played in my moral, educational and skills development.

Since I can remember, I have been fascinated by the question of “can I eat that?”. Oh, the wild independence of living off the land! Naya Nuki was followed in turn by all the greats of survivalist literature in my pantheon of imagination. Of COURSE there was “My Side of the Mountain” with the acorn pancakes and the algae. I mean, which of us didn’t want to run away from our families and support ourselves living in the hollow of an ancient tree with our forest friends? I also read “Robinson Crusoe”, obviously, and liked it well enough. But I read “Swiss Family Robinson” until the cover fell off (not realizing that it was closer to the fantasy of Tolkien than any historical account). How easy it was for the knowledgeable and hardworking to look to the land for all one needed! And lest you think that I only read white-savior-survival books, “Island of the Blue Dolphins” and “Julie of the Wolves” were also well-worn on my shelves. Heck, even in Tolkien Aragorn saves the day by finding kingsfoil by scent in the dark after the Nazgul attack on Weathertop, and Sam finds herbs to spice the survival meals he and Frodo subsist upon up to the gates of Mordor itself.

It was clear to me that in order to be the self-reliant, capable person I wanted to be – to be ready for anything from ringwraiths to shipwrecks to poverty – I would need to be able to forage competantly.

I even tried to take ethnobotany – a 300 level course – in college in order to accomplish this task. (It was pointed out to me that given that I hadn’t taken ANY botany classes this was probably not going to work. Alas. And also it didn’t teach foraging, so pthfft.)

Then I started a job, and lived in the city (compared to where I grew up), and had kids and you know. Somehow I’ve never been shipwrecked, lost in the woods, or on the run from orcs. But I’ve never lost my fascination with this idea of the virtue of knowing what it was you were looking at – and whether you could eat it.

For many years now I’ve had a farm share. It’s taught me a lot about the background skills of foraging. For example: spring greens. How to not by hungry by eating them. (Answer: not gonna happen. Please add cheese/eggs/beans/avocados etc.) It has also helped me understand the spikiness of foods in temperate climates. There are the hungry times, and the times where you can’t possibly eat it fast enough to prevent it from rotting. Foraging is all well and good when you’re on the run from your Blackfoot captors, but you need to also preserve foods if you have any intention of eating in February. And spoiler alert: most of the ways I know how to preserve especially fruits involve significant quantities of white sugar – an element likely to be in short supply in a shipwreck.

But there are pleasures that come with knowing your local flora beyond the practicality of eating it. Sure, I nibbled on a beach plum as I walked the Greenway Monday. (It was bitter still – needed to leave it longer.) But to look and not just see a wall of green but individual plants with their own personalities and uses. That particular quarter mile of Greenway has the easy ones: dandelion, crabapple, knotweed. It also has wild grape, the beach plum, staghorn sumac, chicory, milkweed, wild rose and many other plants crowding to our attention on overgrown verges – some edible, some not, so many invasive. I don’t usually eat them (except the crabapple when it bears), but I do enjoy saying hi to them. And I always VOW that NEXT year I’m going to try sumac lemonade.

The plot of land on which I live is devastatingly small – a tiny tenth of an acre mostly taken up by house and cars. But there are a few corners on which I may place a plant or two. And each of those plants is as attended to and beloved – my gaze falling upon them many times a day.

As avid readers know, I originally planted a Damson Plum, under the influence of yet another book (“Miss Buncle’s Book” by DE Stevenson). It was felled by disease before it ever bore a crop, although it was beautiful and gave glorious shade. But watching a British fruit felled by American disease (ah, how the tables turn!) I vowed to plant only natives in this small patch of Massachusetts I call home. Well, except for lilacs which are the “Pocahontas” version so clearly a North American native*. But I wanted these plants to be edible, in case of future food scarcity in which we would clearly live or die by whether my .01 of an acre bore food or not. I’ve discussed the paw paw investment I’ve made (only two of the original 4 pawpaws I planted yet survive – harassed by human intervention but those two are thriving and I’m hoping for flowers as early as next year). But in the corner of the yard, where I might plant a hydrangea or rose bush, I planted an aronia bush.

The varietal I planted is “Autumn Magic” – bolstering the bright autumnal scene of the back yard, with the invasive Norway maples looking all local in their coloring. Not chokecherry, mind, but chokeberry. I was searching for a North American native fruit I could turn to jam, jelly and sauce but couldn’t buy in a grocery store. This is a much easier task than you might think – so few of the delicious plants available are suitable to mass market production.

With the example of the plum before me, I assumed it would be years (or never) before my Aronia bore any fruit. I didn’t get too excited when it laid out a glorious spread of blossoms: I’d seen that play before. I was pleased when flower turned to green fruit, but I thought that it was unlikely to be my own harvest. The nativeness in the plant was evident by the absolute deliciousness evidenced by the rabbits. The poor shrub, fast growing as it was, was of the utmost appeal to the coneys that invaded New England this year. No faster did a shoot appear than it was cut down by sharp tooth to feed the rapacious bunnies of the back yard. I clad it first in a plastic bottle, now in a vinyl sheath in an attempt to allow it to grow enough to survive the onslaught. And to my great surprise, the birds are far less interested than the rabbits in this ripe and appealing fruit.

And I’ve been rewarded to my great surprise with effulgent, ripe berries. I tasted one – tart on my tongue in the August heat. Adam muddled and decorated with them for a gin bramble. I ordered “The Forager’s Pantry” which features Aronia on the main cover, to extend my set of books and recipes for ingredients you can’t buy at Stop and Shop. The remainder of the unharvested berries is far too few for any serious purpose: pie or sauce or jam. But it gives me hope that my tiny back yard, with its stance on native plants, might yet provide a harvest of treats that are new to me, and old to this continent and those who have lived here so long.

I hope Naya Nuki would be proud.

*Not a North American native.