Fruit was beginning to form on a mountain ash the other day, and he remembered a man who had lived long in Wicklow and who came to think of the tree as a symbol of his happy youth. When he went to the city and daily to his civil service job, he kept up his rambling habits. It was one of his greatest pleasures, when he came upon a fruiting rowan or mountain ash, to instruct his children to take one or two into the mouth, bite or crunch once, and then spit out. For the quinine bitter taste was only to the liking of the addict, but quenched thirst. It was widely known in the Wicklow of his days - more than a century ago.
And a book by Jaromir Pokorny, published in Prague, but translated into other languages, says that the tree sorbus aucuparia grows almost everywhere in Europa. To the North, beyond the polar circle, in the south east, it's in Asia Minor and even beyond the Urals and in Siberia. It grows from lowlands to an altitude of 1,600 metres. It can withstand freezing conditions and can get by on most types of soil. It can take over where forests have been desertified. Birds, of course, spread the colourful fruit and keep this tenacious tree thriving. In the French version of this book, sorbus aucuparia has the name "Birdcatchers' sorbus." For they set their nets and traps among the bright fruit.
The former Wicklow aficionado would be interested to know that today the best cookbooks recommend a bright red jelly, half rowan berries and half apples, to go with game. A reader set a poser, saying he could not get in any garden centre sorbris hibernica. Was not this another name for the rowan? No. In the splendid book Trees of Ireland by Charles Nelson and Wendy Walsh, sorbus hihernica turns out to be the Irish Whitebeam. Its soft green leaves (gooseberry fool colour) are now out. The eventual fruit, he writes, broader than long, with white felt covering when young, becoming hairless and scarlet. They are bigger than the rowan berries. Nelson quotes the 18th century Dr Rutty who says that the whitebeam fruit, `kept in straw and rotted, acquires a sweetness like medlars.' The same Dr Rutty says that peasants in Burgandy eat it greedily; it is also eaten by the Irish. And you can use them as you use rowan berries.