Glint

Pete took this shot a couple of days ago, when we were out in the garden moving more of the concrete blocks around. It’s resin produced by the cherry tree – solidified sap. Very pretty glinting in the sunlight, but not enough to save the cherry tree as it does nothing but feed the birds and attract blackfly. My patience with it and the plum tree (which attracted swarms of wasps last summer) is at an end, and they will be removed before spring.

But in the Countryfile Christmas special (aired yesterday and available on the iPlayer until Christmas Day there is a lovely bit about tree resins and other plants.

The Countryfile team have invaded a Warwickshire village and are orchestrating a traditional village-wide Christmas celebration. John Craven has been given the task of finding local alternatives to gold, frankincense and myrrh, and sets of into the countryside.

He begins about 12 minutes into the programme, if you want to skip ahead, in a nature reserve with forager Fergus Drennan. They’re looking for something with a myrrh-like flavour, to replace the exotic tree resin in the gift box. Fergus leads the way to a patch of Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) – apparently the flavour of the leaves and roots is pretty myrrh-like. It certainly appears to be an acquired taste….

At around 15 minutes into the programme, John Craven moves on to Garden Organic Ryton to meet head gardener Andy Strachan (I’ve met him, he’s a lovely chap :) who is apparently an expert on incense. Andy has some frankincense to try, and then it’s off into the orchard to collect some resin samples to try. Apparently gage plum resin smells like burned toast, so no joy there, but the Morello cherry resin is much more promising as a homegrown incense. So I may just go out and collect my sap sample and see how it smells :)

While frankincense was the bees knees a couple of thousand years ago, and the cherry incense is nice, neither fits the modern idea of a Christmassy smell, so 17 minutes into the show Andy and John are off to a Christmas tree farm to look for pine resin samples. The Christmas incense is quickly collected, the second gift goes in the box and they chop down an enormous tree for the village green.

As gold is not easily found in Warwickshire, a creative approach was taken for the third gift. John ended up at a brewery that uses light malts to produce a golden brew, and have a lovely reed-bed style system for cleaning up their effluents too. That one is in a separate segment, about 24 minutes in.

Making figgy pudding, donkeys and a young man who wants to a shepherd round out the show, and you can’t get much more Christmassy than that ;)