A Questionable Home-Made Liqueur

A Questionable Home-Made Liqueur

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THERE are two types of sorbs. One is the delightful Slavonic people who live in Germany’s beautiful Spreewald and press the seeds of common blue flax to make a salad dressing. And the other is a species of rowan known as the service tree—or Sorbus domestica by botanists.

It turns up very occasionally in the woodlands of southern England and Wales where tremendous efforts are made to conserve the few remaining specimens, which is rather unnecessary since the trees are not native to the British Isles but probably just escapees from medieval monastery gardens.

A service tree in full autumn beauty is a staggering sight. The fruits hang down in clusters, rather like its cousin, the common mountain ash or rowan, but the individual fruits are much bigger—the size of a large cherry—and they usually ripen to red on their sunny side. The species is native to Mediterranean hills, especially Italy and Greece, but you also see it inland throughout the Balkans and much of south-west France. The leaves look like any other rowan—long and pinnate—and produce a bit of autumn colour, but not much. Anyway, it’s the fruits for which people grow it.