It is early April in England as I write. The two apple trees are beginning to flower in our modest garden near the Devil’s Highway. They have been pruned this year to keep them from over growing and shedding apples onto our neighbour’s property. I like to watch them go through their seasonal changes from flowering to fruiting. I watch the apples grow and ripen and pick them one at a time for cooking purposes. Blackbirds and Thrushes feed on the windfalls. When the cold weather grinds us down a squadron of Fieldfares appears under the tree and feeds voraciously and briefly on the remains. One tree is of the Bramley variety and the other a Golden Delicious. They are rooted together in a perpetual cross-pollinating partnership.

When my sister and I were very young there were two fruit trees on our family farm, cannily planted together as cross pollinators. One of the variety known as Victoria, bore rich purple fruit and the other, a Greengage tree, bore green fruit touched with gold. Their summer ripened fruits were picked by our father and preserved by our mother in sealed jars which she stored in the cool pantry. Throughout the winter, the jars were opened one by one and we ate the preserved plums made more palatable by glutinous blobs of sweet custard. We would place the plums stones around the rim of our dish and try to foretell our future by counting them to the familiar chant; ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor – rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief’.

Years later I had an office near the docks in Benghazi. One of the city’s date palm trees stood outside the window. Once a year a man parked his bicycle against the office wall, climbed the palm tree and dabbed about in its fronds with what appeared to be a piece of vegetation. Out of politeness he did not stare at me as I worked nor I at him. He was Benghazi’s official palm tree pollinator.

Like willow and cannabis, date palms are dioecious; that is there are separate male and female trees. The male trees produce copious pollen in male flowers. The female trees grow flowers which need pollinating before they develop into edible fruit. Left to their own devices date palms would make do with the chancy process of wind pollination. This is clearly unproductive in Libya which is dry and sandy and where dates are a dietary staple. It would mean growing many male trees whose brief and explosive moment of importance would not justify their long use of precious water. Therefore, humans intervene and grow one male tree for every fifty or so female trees.  That is why the man parked his ancient bicycle outside my office window, detached a cluster of male flowers from the handlebars, discarded his sandals, clambered up the palm tree and brushed fertilising pollen onto its female flowers. I was too young and impatient to watch the fruit clusters grow.

Long ago, before the Toyota motor car company put camels out of the desert travel and warfare business, a human could survive for a very long time on strong tea, camel’s milk and dried dates.

For a while June and I and our daughter, Nikki, lived in a second-floor apartment near Port Moresby in Papua. The crown of a mango tree grew outside our bedroom windows.  There were two reasons to regret this. The first was a vocal and insomniac tree frog which was only interrupted by the arrival of the flying foxes. That would have been a welcome relief were it not for the noises flying foxes make.

Flying foxes are very large bats and their wings are made of black skin stretched over bones. When the flap them, and they do so often to keep cool, they make an obscene noise, especially so if you are trying to sleep a yard or so away from their roost.  When we lived in that benighted place the mango fruit ripened. Flying foxes eat mango fruit greedily and slobber when they do so. June soon found us a villa with a view of the sea and no mango trees in the garden.