Finally, now that we’ve reached Midsummer, it begins to feel more like summer. Sunshine and warmth: days for sandals and leaving the jumper at home. The smell of freshly cut grass and the sound of bees buzzing from flower to flower. Being able to leave the washing out all day to dry in the sun.

Although today (Friday), as I edit, the sun has vanished. Still warm, still dry, but a thick blanket of clouds in need of a wash. Definitely threatening rain. Shame it’s not threatening a thunderstorm.

A couple of years ago, M got some fruit bushes for the garden: two blueberries and two honeyberry bushes. We also have a mulberry bush and a fig tree, both gifts.

The blueberries have been fantastic ever since, providing us with lots of berries each summer. This season promises to be the same again, with masses of blossom in the spring and now lots of little green berries are developing nicely.

The honeyberries have not been quite so fantastic. In fact, we’ve had no berries. At all. Until a few weeks ago, when M suddenly spotted a couple of blue-purple berries on one of them. The first, and probably the last. This year, anyway. Neither of us have seen blossom on either bush, so we’ve no idea where they came from.

They’re supposed to be blue when ripe, so we promptly ate them. Probably a day or two early, though, because they were a bit sharper than their name suggests they should be. We’ll probably have to wait another few years before we get to try them again. But it’s good to know that the honeyberry bushes do, in fact, produce fruits. Even, apparently, without blossom. So we shan’t dispose of them just yet.

The mulberry hasn’t yet produced berries, and the fig started a single fruit, and then it fell off and that was that. At least so far this year. It did give us one fig last year, which ripened, and by which Tiny was not impressed. Nor by any of the many my mother’s well-established fig produced, so we know it wasn’t anything our fig did.

But they’re all considerably more pleasant to smell than the titan arum, which bloomed at Kew this month: it’s more familiar name is the Corpse Flower. It only flowers every other year, and thank goodness, if reports of its smell are anything to go by! Its name might give a clue, if you haven’t heard of it. I’m not sure I’ll ever be among the queues waiting to sniff that, though the flower itself has some gorgeous colours. I’ll stick to my non-blooming, fruiting-when-it-feels-like-it honeyberry bushes, thank you very much.