Once upon a blackberry
AS late summer bends towards autumn, the hedgerows are glistening with blackberries. For most of the year, these arching, prickly trails, the scourge of walkers, largely go unnoticed, but, from mid August, they attract blackberry pickers searching for the most collected wild food in the UK. The boundless bramble is generally considered invincible, yet, according to a recent survey, there has been a significant decline in its distribution over the past two decades—a result of excessive tidying of field edges and scrub. It’s bad news for foragers, but even worse for the web of wildlife that depends on the bramble bush’s bounty all through the year.
‘Purple fingers and scratched arms “are proof of satisfying toil against unruly Nature”’
agg. is a family. Its hooks allow it to scramble over everything in its path and, whenever the tip of a stem touches the ground, it immediately takes root, sending up a new plant capable of growing up to 6½ft. Bramble is a well-known coloniser of wasteland, but the plant itself is, in turn, colonised by a vast array of creatures; it is estimated that as many as 150 species of invertebrate use it as a food plant. Most arrive in May, to coincide with the pink, white or purple, five-petalled flowers—this is the time when the bramble bush becomes an entomologist’s delight, crawling with bumblebees, lacewings, butterflies and argumentative hoverflies.
