Hedgerow apples

The hedgerow crab apple trees are hanging with fruit this year. Being a keen forager, from a long line of keen foragers, I was highly tempted to bring home a sackful. Just in time I remembered that we still have a score of unopened jars of crab apple jelly that I made last Autumn!
The extra is another kind of "apple", an oak apple gall. The oak apple gall is caused by a tiny gall wasp, Biorhiza pallida. Between May and June the female wasps lay their eggs in the leaf buds of oak trees. The tree responds by producing a gall inside of which there are a number of chambers, each housing a larva which eventually eats its way out to produce a new adult.
Oak apples used to be very important as, for centuries, they were used to produce black ink.