My crazy friend planted a medlar tree up here a couple years ago. Last year it produced one tiny, currant-sized fruit. This year it produced three. Someday, perhaps, it will yield something of a decent size so I can finally get a taste.
Here are some medlar-related quotations that I dug up at her request when she first made her purchase:
"This white top advertises my old years,
My heart, too, is as mouldy as my hairs,
Unless I fare like medlar, all perverse.
For that fruit's never ripe until it's worse,
And falls among the refuse or in straw.
We ancient men, I fear, obey this law:
Until we're rotten, we cannot be ripe."
(prologue to "The Reeve's Tal," The Canterbury Tales)
"Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
O Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open-arse and thou a poperin pear!"
(Romeo and Juliet, act 2, scene 1, lines 34-38)
"I scarce know her, for the beauty of her cheek hath,
like the moon, suffered strange eclipses since I beheld it:
women are like medlars.--no sooner ripe but rotten"
(Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore)
"Wineskins of brown morbidity, autumnal excrementa ...
an exquisite odour of leave taking"
(D.H. Lawrence)
"A fruit, vulgarly called an open arse; of which it is
more truly than delicately said, that it is never ripe till it
is as rotten as a turd, and then it is not worth a fart."
(18th century definition of the medlar fruit)
Take that, RJ.
