The woodland will provide building materials and, judging by the huge clusters of nuts and berries there at the moment, a surprising amount of food.
"There were big piles of gleaming fruit and huge plates of sandwiches on the bigger tables, and on tiny little tables under the bushes there were ears of corn and berries threaded on straws and clusters of nuts nestling in their own leaves," she writes.
Each tea is distinctive, but all are pleasantly enhanced by the house selection of sweets served with them: Half a mooncake is filled with chewy ground dates and nuts; thin, round rosy-colored wafers are flavored with sanzashi, or hawthorn; honey-dipped clusters of nuts and puffed dough are reminiscent of Cracker Jacks, and roasted black sesame seeds are caramelized into sticks of crunchy brittle.
He has a local confectionery make clusters of nuts with white, milk and dark chocolate, and he is "playing in the kitchen" himself, making molasses bars with raisins and toasted macadamias.
Cluster of betel nuts, seeds of the betel palm (Areca catechu).
There was also a cluster of Syrian nut purveyors around the Washington Market, once the city's main food bazaar, and which closed to make way for the World Trade Center, said Nancy Ralph, director of the NY Food Museum.
With any luck, spring will arrive without any more arctic freezes that could damage the tiny, almost invisible female flowers, and by autumn, the trees will be decked out with clusters of fat nuts in papery husks.
The pork acquires a delicacy of texture and flavour that leads some to mistake it for veal, and the milk disappears to be replaced by clusters of delicious, nut-brown sauce.
The year-round best seller is the Symphony, a chocolate cake with praline and chocolate mousses decorated with a cluster of gold leaf and candied nuts.
The group is characterized by alternately arranged, simple, deciduous, marginally toothed leaves; bisexual flowers with 6 to 18 pistils (female organs) on short stalks and numerous stamens (male, pollen-producing structures) but no sepals or petals; and fruits consisting of a cluster of dry, winged, single-seeded nuts (samaras) with a notch in one side.
For example, remains of crabs consumed by the hominins were clustered around the hearth, as were the remains of nuts and stone tools, such as anvils and choppers, suitable for cracking them open.
