Coffee Table Book of: Berries (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Berries is a large format book of berries, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: berries ripening on the plant, the wild places where they grow, the cranberry bog through its year, and the jams, pies and puddings they become.

Garden and field berries follow their season: strawberry flowers and runners on dark soil and ripe fruit on golden straw, raspberries on arching canes after summer rain and in long rows on wires, blueberry bells in spring, dusty blue clusters in summer and bare red twigs in snow, translucent red and white currants, glossy blackcurrants and veined gooseberries.

Wild berries fill the hedgerows, heaths and woods: blackberries at every stage of ripeness, elderberries, rowan and hawthorn haws, bilberries in pine woods and on open hillsides, crowberry and dewberry by the sea, lingonberries through lichen and moss, cloudberries on wet bogs, sea buckthorn on the dunes, juniper in frost, holly under snow and bearberry on the autumn tundra.

The cranberry bog is seen through its year: pale pink flowers on trailing vines, beds flooded for the harvest with crimson fruit afloat and gathered by floating booms, an old wooden scoop with long teeth, a berry cut open to show the air inside, and a bog frozen under a winter dusk.

The kitchen keeps the harvest: a copper preserving pan, jars of jam sealed hot, red currant juice dripping through cloth for a clear jelly, elderberry syrup, a lattice blackberry pie, a strawberry tart in rings, a summer pudding soaked deep red, a gooseberry fool, lingonberry jam on rice pudding, and berries dried to keep.

Short notes run through the book, on how berries grow and ripen, where the wild kinds are found, and how the harvest is kept: the tiny specks on a strawberry are its true fruits, and each one holds a single seed, cranberries hold pockets of air, so in a flooded bog the loosened berries float to the top, blueberry flowers hang like small white bells, and bees carry the pollen between them, and a cranberry has four air filled chambers inside, which is why it floats.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.