At this point I’ve almost given up hoping, but with any luck there’ll be frost pretty soon, to put the garden out of its misery. In the old days – a decade ago, or, if you’re being strictly accurate, last month – frost was to dread, on account of the tender food items that were still coming in. But absence of frost, while necessary, is not sufficient in these matters. All good things from raspberries to zucchini need warmth and sunshine to develop flavor… and while ample moisture is important,

Well, let’s just say this weather has only been right for mushrooms and even the mushrooms are slow. It may be that they’re sogged out, or they may just be a month late, along with almost everything else.

I say “almost” because the nuts are more or less on time. The back yard is littered with black walnuts and our neighbors’ Chinese chestnut tree is raining abundance all over the street. The chestnuts are small but quite tasty, and this year they seem to be less buggy than usual.

But hassle factor aside, we still gather them with mixed emotions because they remind us of what has been lost — and of how quickly it vanished. Once the chestnut blight arrived, at the end of the 19th century, it took less than 50 years to effectively wipe out the mightiest hardwood of the Eastern forest. American chestnuts are still abundant, because the roots survive chestnut blight and keep sending up new shoots. But the shoots are frustration incarnate: they grow quickly into beautiful small trees and then, just as they start to gain stature and bear – death. Over and over and over.

If we had room to plant large trees, we’d link up with one of the organizations devoted to bringing our chestnuts back. The American Chestnut Foundation (www.acf.org) is the largest and best publicized, but if you are not a fan of Peabody coal, there is perhaps even more to like about the much smaller American Chestnut Cooperator’s Foundation (http://www.accf-online.org), which originates at Virginia tech.