The Revenge of the Loquat

Never insult a plant - they have their own ways of getting back at you. A couple of weeks ago I made some very disparaging remarks about the fruit of the Japanese medlar (or loquat) tree. But only a couple of days later our caretaker picked the fruit of the tree in the garden of our apartment block and gave me several kilos. And they were delicious. He must have picked them at just the right moment, as they were soft and sweet but not at all gungy. The rest of my family declined anyway, but (with some sturdy help from the hamster) I gorged for about a week. And then started to itch ... and scratch ... and swell up. And it turns out I'm allergic to the things.

As always with these things, it flared up really badly on Friday, just after the doctor's surgery had closed for the weekend. So I had a thoroughly miserable weekend. It's easing up now, but if you happen to be in Milan and come across a madwoman with ears like Dumbo violently scratching her scalp, you'll know who you're looking at. I'm sorry, tree, I'm sorry ...

On Medlars and Shakespeare

At the end of last October I posted about the medlar tree outside the balcony which was then in flower and full of swarms of bees - so the bees were certainly around before the winter, despite what I said in the post On Bees the other day. Anyway, the tree is now full of ripe fruit, much to the delight of the local birds who are doing their best to get to it before we do.

I've realised that the name medlar may have been misleading. It's actually a Japanese medlar, or loquat (Eriobotrya japonica), which is a different genus from what is normally meant by medlar (Mespilus) though both are from the same subfamily maloideae - which also includes fruits like apples and pears.

Loquats (nespole in Italian) are quite popular here - lots of people grow them and you can buy them in greengrocers and supermarkets. I've never seen them in Britain and maybe the climate's not suitable for the tree. But even the other type of medlar seems to have gone out of fashion in the UK. Till I came here I had only ever heard of it through Shakespeare's plays. I don't actually like the loquat fruit much, and it seems that Shakespeare didn't like the type of medlar he was familiar with either, as all the references are derogatory. His description of the fruit in As You Like It is just as true of the loquat as of other medlars - Touchstone has been reading some dreadful poetry written for Rosalind by Orlando and says ...

Touchstone : This is the very false gallop of verses: why do you infect yourself with them?
Rosalind : Peace! you dull fool: I found them on a tree.
Touchstone : Truly, the tree yields bad fruit.
Rosalind : I’ll graff it with you, and then I shall graff it with a medlar: then it will be the earliest fruit i’ the country; for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right virtue of the medlar.

When they're not ripe, loquats are very sharp - but they then turn brown and rotten very quickly. So you tend to bite into them and find acid on one side and gunge on the other.

But the tree is beautiful, with broad glossy leaves which are light green when they're young and turn dark green as they get older. Ours is right outside the kitchen and I often stand on the balcony with a glass of wine in the evening while dinner is cooking, just looking at it.

Indian Summer

I said last week that the temperature had dropped and called the post The Beginning of Winter. This week we've had record temperatures for the time of year. It's been up to about 25°C some days, and this morning I was back out on the balcony in a T-shirt. A few things gave up when the temperature fell last week, and I spent most of the morning clearing them out, but everything that didn't is continuing to flower happily. And as you can see from the photo, the bees are continuing to visit. At the back of the house there's a medlar tree which is now in flower, and this morning it was covered in swarms of bees and the odd butterfly. Most of the butterflies seem to have succumbed to the cold though - I haven't seen any of the little brown ones which were so common up to a few weeks ago.

All very nice, but as I gardened this morning I was wondering what havoc it was liable to play with the environment in general. Turned on the TV to watch the BBC World news over lunch, and found a feature on how climate change in the world as a whole is threatening to turn large areas of Africa to desert. And checking on their schedule for the rest of the day, there's a programme this evening on the melting of the Arctic permafrost and the catastrophe that it's liable to cause because of greenhouse gases being released. A depressing end for an otherwise lovely, sunny Sunday morning...

The medlar tree flowers between November and February