An ideal time for park nuts

THERE are nuts in every park.

Let me loose, I’m turning into one of them. It’s ironic, really: the Celts believed that eating hazelnuts imparted wisdom and inspiration — but when I collected a bunch of windfall nuts for nibbles in my local suburban park by an old quarry, what do you know? They were acorns, nicely brown, out of their caps, or cups — but definitely not hazelnuts.

Acorns mightn’t kill you, but most are full of tannins, and there’s enough of those boys in wine. Acorns could push a body over the edge.

Learning journeys (and/or foraging) should sensibly start with a grain of wisdom — or a guidebook, such as Nature for Dummies: maybe I could write it, under the pseudonym Sessile Woods.

Dummy nature books in mind, and prepared to live dangerously, I’m currently turning my local suburban park into a version of US writer Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and quite possibly turning myself into a bit of a park stalker, and its resident nut, all at the same time.

A learned colleague on this page, Dick Warner, wrote just last month about Irish, native and naturalised oak species, and hopefully will avert his gaze from this L-plated columnist’s wandering woodland ways, foolishly happy in attempts to remedy blissful ignorance and to put a name on everything.

Now, in normal company, I wouldn’t be the worst at identifying trees — even if, sometimes, a leaf suggests one thing, the nut or seed another, and the bark or Barker? Well, hands up, the latter’s often up the wrong tree.

So, I’ve dug out the old nature guides we as a family tried to get the kids interested in fadó, fadó — back when! I gave their mother a west Cork hand-woven hazelnut-gathering basket (that’s what the hippy craft shop called it) as a gift.

I was rightly and rhetorically withered: “This isn’t quite a handbag, is it? When’s the hazelnut-gathering season?” (Answer: not May).

I was again carried away with recession-driven romanticism after visiting friends just back from Switzerland, who’d just harvested bags of hazelnuts. Thrilled with the freshness, and the fact they weren’t covered in foil, chocolate or yoghurt, I thought all my birthdays had come together when two days later I found drifts of similar nuts in the wooded section of a public park while walking the dogs. The fact they were surrounded by oak leaves should have been clue enough ...

Aah, the park, centre of a five-day a week working suburban universe. The next week after the inadvertent hazelnut/acorn harvest (a few may germinate to grow in pots, not all were wasted. Out of tiny hazelnuts mighty oaks grow?). I was again doing the park’s rounds, and pondering perhaps an Outdoors column on that week’s current news and radio items about abandoned exotic pets and their impact on native species and biodiveristy.

Walking slowly, in front of me, was a man, acting strangely, following a line of trees, and going down, deep, into the densest wooded portion while all the time scanning the leaf-shedding trees, searching. I now knew he wasn’t about to raid any rare hazelnuts, and so I innocently ! inquired, “Have you lost a bird or something?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m with the ESB, we’ll be cutting back the trees by the lines next week.”

Now, even speaking as a half-witted columnist and pen-man, that’s a good line on which to wind up a column. If you can’t leave ‘em laughing with you, laughing at you is a good, second-best. But, the plot deepens. Or, perhaps thins.

This week, back on the same-old, same old suburban park round (I now know the trees by name, seed and breed, by the way, and am on amiable acquaintance with most of the dog walkers too: good luck, Pluto!) the mutts let loose a few random barks at a man coming our way with a shovel, a metal detector, and earphones wired up to his subterranean searches. He looked like a bee, on a bee-line.

I apologised for their barking boldness, and explained they’d been spooked by his unusual appearance, his scanning actions and implements.

“They can sense things, you know,” he agreed readily, and generously, while continuing his hovering search. “But do you know that when you listen, you can actually read their minds?”

Had I heard him right, or was I gone nuts myself? The dogs stayed mute: was I the only nut in the park?