Sandy's Garden ... Nutmeg

We are approaching the end of the season of Lent.
Sandy SimpsonSandy Simpson
Sandy Simpson

That part of the liturgical calendar that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends approximately six weeks later on the Thursday before Good Friday, meaning that Lent began on 1 March 2017 and will end on 13 April … we have become accustomed to seeing shelf-loads of hot cross buns in every baker’s shop and in every supermarket. But hot cross buns … or, more accurately, hot crossed buns … almost certainly predate Christianity and were baked by our pagan ancestors to mark the restarting of the natural world after winter, the four segments created by the cross probably representing the four seasons and possibly also the four quarters of the moon. It is unlikely that our pagan forebears used any spices in their buns: but we know that, by the sixteenth century for certain, spiced buns were in vogue, although we must wait until the beginning of the eighteenth century to find the first recorded reference to ‘hot’ cross buns in the couplet, ‘Good Friday come this month, the old woman runs. / With one or two a penny hot cross buns.’

By the end of the eighteenth century, this supposed nursery rhyme is published in the Newest Christmas Box, printed in London in 1797: “I had a little nut tree, / Nothing would it bear, / But a silver nutmeg / And a golden pear; / The King of Spain’s daughter / Came to visit me, / And all for the sake / Of my little nut tree.” Now, given that nutmeg … which has an aromatic, sweet, warm and rich flavour … is found in virtually every recipe for hot cross buns, I have, from time to time, wondered if nutmeg might have been grown in this country, perhaps in the hothouses of a grand country estate, which might also explain why the King of Spain’s daughter came calling. For any reader who is unfamiliar with nutmeg, it is one of the two spices … the other being mace … derived from several species of tree in the genus Myristica. The seed of the species Myristica fragrans … an evergreen tree indigenous to the Banda Islands in the Spice Islands of Indonesia … is egg-shaped, some 20mm to 30mm long by 15mm to 18mm wide, and weighs between 5g and 10g after being dried. And, since the British took control of the Banda Islands from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars … between 1799 and 1815 … and transplanted nutmeg trees, complete with soil, to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called, we Brits were clearly familiar with nutmeg before the end of the eighteenth century. So might it have been grown here as the nursery rhyme might suggest?

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Well, gentle reader, the answer is a definite NO! Myristica fragrans is a tropical tree which might just grow indoors in these islands in a very large pot. However, to succeed in persuading the trees to produce nuts, the gardener would have to plant several nutmeg seeds in huge pots about six metres … say 18 feet … apart to allow for their eventual growth, for several trees are required for pollination to enable them to produce the nutmeg pods. And given that the trees will have reached a height of 9 to 18 metres … 30 to 60 feet ... by the time they are mature, this is not a viable project even in the hothouses of a stately home! I might add that another reason for not growing nutmeg trees in an enormous heated greenhouse at one’s rural retreat is that nutmeg’s rich, spicy scent is attractive to dogs: but eating the tree’s fruits causes seizures, tremors, and nervous system disorders in the animal, reactions which can prove fatal.

So how did the so-called nursery rhyme originate? Well, if you have ever wondered why a football player is said to have been nutmegged when the ball passes between his legs, I shall say only that meaning of ‘nutmeg’ in the actually very vulgar rhyme refers to something between the legs of the sportsman … but enough, there may be children listening.