It's payback time as bountiful Britain basks in a tide of plenty The cherry trees from Kent to Herefordshire have dripped with fat, crimson fruit as growers had their best harvest in more than a decade; yields are expected to be almost three times what they were last year, and worth almost £20 million. In Kent, fourth-generation soft-fruit grower Robert Hinge expects to bring in several tonnes of plump, downy apricots. On the Isle of Wight, a grower who has been experimenting for Waitrose with possibly Britain's biggest commercial crop of outdoor tomatoes this century is thanking his lucky stars - he couldn't have chosen a better year. Flowers, too, have flourished, particularly lavender, which famously thrives in the warm dry heat of Provence but this year has been filling the air from Norfolk to Somerset to Shropshire with its glorious fragrance. "British lavender has seen a sales uplift with us of 25 per cent, while bunches of British-grown sunflowers have gone up by 60 per cent," says M&S's plant buyer, James Nash. "It has been spectacular," agrees Fergus Drennan, a wild-food expert who runs foraging courses around Canterbury (fergustheforager.co.uk). Morello cherries, in particular. I've never seen the hedges so laden. I've been out for days on end. In one spot I was picking wild cherries for four hours and you could hardly tell I'd taken anything.Blackberries are bursting forth and walnuts are going to be fantastic this year. There are so many walnut trees around, on waste ground, bridleways and footpaths. For this tide of plenty we don't just have the stretch of sunny weeks across July and August to thank but also the freezing winter and wretched summer that came before it. It's payback time. "One thing that happens if you have a bad year is that plants want to make up," says Colin Crosbie, curator at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Wisley. We had a wet autumn and a cold winter, and in this hot summer the rain all seems to have arrived at the right time. The things that have done well are those that flower slightly later - that's why we're seeing a good apple harvest. We got off to a slow start, so flowering was quite late but that also meant that, once the rain stopped, pollination went well - there were lots of insects and bees. Here at Wisley, the tomatoes are great, as are the potatoes, brassicas and fruiting vegetables such as courgettes. It is still only August, though, and for some growers the success of the season is far from guaranteed. As a wine lover, I have been desperately hoping our 400-odd vineyards will get the grape harvest they deserve after 2012"s washout. The indications, following an almost unbearably sluggish start, are better than anyone imagined. "For the past year all the viticulture scholars have been banging on about how miserable 2013 would be - even if we had an extraordinary summer - because the weather in 2012 was so bad that the floral initiation process (which determines the following year's crop size) would have to be disastrously low," says Dermot Sugrue, the winemaker at Wiston Estate. Well, the opposite has turned out to be true. Grape farmers have a massive crop of fruit this year, following a very successful flowering. It's a good start but as anyone in the wine trade knows, there is a long way to go, with many opportunities for disaster. Wise old hand Mike Roberts at Ridgeview, one of our most garlanded producers, puts it like this: "As Kipling said, 'If"; if we can have modest ordinary weather from here on and some Indian Summer for veraison [the onset of ripening] and harvest itself, we could be looking back in November at a beautiful and even plentiful harvest."