A warm autumn afternoon: blue sky scattered with cumulus, three red kites wheeling above. I’ve come to gather blackberries – an age-old pursuit, gentle in rhythm, quietly absorbing.
At the scrub’s edge, I meet a formidable bramble. Its stems are red, grooved, thicker than my thumb, and arch outwards for 10 metres or more with fearsome spines. This is giant blackberry, introduced from eastern Europe for its large, plentiful berries, though not today – its fruit have gone over already. An aggressive coloniser, it sprawls into dense, impassable thickets, seemingly intent on swallowing whole patches of land.
Nearby, beneath flowery grassland, the ferociously prickled stems of railway bramble criss‑cross the ground like tripwires. Its fruit, though, is meagre and misshapen. Further on, an elm‑leaved bramble, its branches heavy with swags of glistening jet-black berries among ruby-red unripe ones. That’s more like it. This familiar hedgerow bramble has fruited generously this year, even if the berries are small.
I pick steadily, the fruit yielding with a soft pop, staining my fingertips purple. A dock bug probes one berry, sipping juice that is sweeter than its usual fare of dock and sorrel seeds. Nearby, a family of chiffchaffs flicker through the scrub, calling softly.
Elsewhere I find slender‑spined, pruinose and Yorkshire brambles, making it a grand total of six different brambles in this small patch – more than the four that the poet John Clare recognised in this parish two centuries ago. It is, however, only a fraction of the 350 or so species now known in the British Isles. The reason for that abundance of variety is that most brambles reproduce asexually, producing seed without fertilisation, and every genetic mutation can give rise to a new species. Some thrive only in rare habitats, others are tied to specific regions, and some are found nowhere else in the world. A few, like the giant blackberry, spread so aggressively that they threaten our native wildlife.
This will probably be the last blackberrying of the year. Already the air carries the sweet tang of fermentation, and soon the remaining fruit will be coated with a white down of mildew. Time to leave the rest for birds and insects – and to look forward to blackberry gin at Christmas.