JOHN MACLEOD: Of jams and jars and brambles... and the sweetness of summer, preserved

Published: 19:34, 5 August 2026 | Updated: 19:34, 5 August 2026 Summer is many things. Tea in the garden. Prosecco on the decking. Bucket-and-spade trips to the beach. Holidays – depending on your means – doon the watter, the wee timeshare in Royal Deeside or the beloved little place in the south of France. And summer is also harvest. Last week – the night of the ‘Buck Moon’, as a full moon in July is traditionally dubbed – I was startled to hear grinding, mechanical work ongoing just in the road after one in the morning. The men down a croft winning their silage were still at it – a duty, once begun, that cannot be interrupted, and sensibly taking advantage of that luminous moon for the occasion, as people who work the land have done as long as there have been people. But the harvest I have most immediately in mind is domestic. Intimate. One of sticky – often pricked – fingers, in some contexts dyed mauve: a great pan a-bubble on the stove and gleaming jars just sterilised in your oven (though a dishwasher cycle is no less effective). These are the weeks of fruit, of berries, of preserves, for little shrieks of domestic virtue more than a row of shiny, lately dated and labelled jars in your larder, set to bestow the colours and flavours of high summer through the bleak months, in due course, shortly to come. Chutney – ridiculously easy to make; you just toss everything in a pan and boil it – or jam, which is a little trickier, especially if you are working with low-pectin fruit like strawberries: they need a bit of a shove to set properly, be it some hard green apple, a scoosh of lemon juice or a sachet of powder. The making of jam was a big part of my childhood. We were all roped into the picking, off my father’s redcurrant and blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes or his lovingly tended raspberry canes. Invariably, I’d be sent to the chemist at some point to buy some citric acid: invariably, as the Virginia Wades and Chris Everts, a Goolagong or a Navratilova hit the Wimbledon finals, my brothers and I would be biddably topping-and-tailing bowls of fruit. A chore, in an era when fibre is rather more esteemed, I no longer deem necessary. But I especially prize these preserves – gooseberry jam, rhubarb jam, bramble jelly – that are the easiest to make and, these days, surprisingly difficult to buy. Strawberries make fabulous jam - a true taste of summer Indeed, laying your mitts on gooseberries at all these days – unless you grow your own – is the stuff of Homeric epic. It has been years since I saw them for sale in any supermarket: the season is brief, the profit margin tenuous, they cannot be harvested mechanically and, given the jaggy thorns, even migrant labourers are loath to get involved. But there is a quiet magic in the making of preserves that has never left me. Even at eight, I was proficient in harvesting thick stalks of summer rhubarb for my mother – armed with a big serrated knife and, in two deft chops, severing the elephant ear of a leaf at one end and the white knobby bit at the other. Then perhaps half an hour chunking said stalks down to half-inch pieces with the same knife. Into the great pan they would go; my mother would pour the sugar on top, and leave it overnight. By the morrow, without a drop of water the sugar would have magically dissolved into clear syrup. There would follow the traditional ginger debate. I happen to like that note of flavour in my rhubarb jam, and it was the way my MacLeod grandmother always made it. But my younger brothers decried the suggestion, and I always lost. Then there was the wonder of the ‘set’ – boiling your conserve to precisely the point where it would just gel and solidify, and no more. We would lay aside a few saucers to chill in the fridge; splash a little jam upon them, in turn, as we hit the rolling boil. If you pushed the sample with your finger, perhaps half a minute later, and it wrinkled… mission accomplished. There were certain outliers to the usual high summer concoction of jam. One is the crafting of lemon curd – delicious, tart and eggy, but which must be refrigerated and does not keep long. Plums – we had a magnificent tree in our back garden in Edinburgh – only ripen in September, long after everything else; and picking them was always in fraught awareness of wasps, who by early autumn are mean, delinquent and drunk. Lurching about in their bovver boots like defiant Nazis in the last days of the Reich. And, of course, set apart from summer all together is the making of your own marmalade, with bitter Seville oranges and around the turn of January to February. It was an agonising question in the personal circles of the late Queen: whatever gifts can you offer a woman who has everything? Who annually opened Parliament in a bejewelled £5billion hat? Well, two presents invariably delighted Elizabeth II – any jigsaw, the more complicated the better, and a pot of home-made preserve. With sadness I learned last month of the death of the Reverend Charlie Robertson, for years minister of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh and who counted the Queen among his parishioners. She once apologised, at the post-service coffee and biscuits, that she only ever attended once a year. ‘Ma’am,’ Mr Robertson soothed her, ‘that is more regularly than most of our communicants’. Plums ripen later in the year... but beware the wasps! As he shared with me several years ago, Mrs Robertson annually made Her Majesty a great jar of the most wonderful marmalade. But Alison Robertson was both the most loyal of subjects and a candid Scotswoman. ‘Your Majesty, I must have that empty jar back every year.’ And back, soon after the bells, that empty jar was humbly sent to the Canongate manse: as if the Queen thought – were it otherwise – dreadful retribution might follow. In the summer of 1985 both my MacLeod grandparents were still alive and, a callow nineteen, I spent some time with them. One July day I hacked my way down the overgrown lot like Sanders of the River and returned, in pink triumph, with several pounds of gooseberries and blackcurrants. Granny, already tremulous with Parkinson’s, duly and in quiet triumph made much jam and insisted I take a jar home with me, ‘as if it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have made it at all’. By the summer following, my grandfather was dead; she, overnight vastly diminished in confidence, a frail old woman. She never made jam again: when I do, four decades on, every jar is an unvoiced tribute to her.