Global Warming Up North

A few years ago I found a funny-looking plant growing under the kitchen window.

A friend of the Communist's, who is an Expert on Funny-Looking Plants, peered at it.

"It's a baby fig tree" she said. And sure enough, the leaves did have the look of something you might wear if you happened to be living in the Garden of Eden.

And 'twas then I remembered eating a fig in the kitchen one day and finding a bit of it to be slightly over-ripe. So I did what I normally do with small, edible, biodegradable things and threw it out of the window, because there's always a hungrily waiting semicircle of birds, cats, foxes, hedgehogs and other life forms out there.

This bit of fig, however, didn't get eaten, and grew, in the sheltered spot just under the window. After a couple of years it was getting rather too big and the leaves were trying to get in through the kitchen window. So my mother moved it one winter to a few yards away at the other side of the lawn, next to the bird table.

It sulked for a bit and grew its leaves rather late, but then picked up again and grew taller and bushier. Here it is now, in front of all the ivy that's covering the garage and providing a good nesting place for several squillion birds:

The birds like to perch on it before hopping onto the bird table.

And now (loud fanfare of trumpets) my fig tree has three figs. Here's one of them, to the left of the picture. They are fig-shaped and about two and a half inches long. Will they ripen in the summer of the North of England?

When I were a lass, you just didn't get figs growing in Yorkshire. Not never, not nohow. You got rhubarb, that was what you got, and even that shivered.

I'm going to plant a banana.