Who doesn’t love blackberries? These juicy delights have been a source of free food from nature’s larder since before recorded history and August is the best month to enjoy them.
By the time you get to late September fruits are still ripening but they are not so delicious because the autumn sun is no longer strong enough to produce large amounts of sugar.
Richard Mabey relates the old tale that the Devil spits or urinates (not the word in the tale) on blackberries on Michaelmas Eve and this turns them sour. The Devil does this because he landed in a bed of Brambles when he was cast down from Heaven on Michaelmas Eve.
Brambles are a scrambling component of many local hedgerows, using their backward pointing prickles (not spines nor thorns) to help them climb above the woody shrubs to reach the light and offer their flowers to pollinators. The juicy sweet fruits are a device to disperse the seeds. The fruits are eaten by birds and mammals and the seeds pass through the digestive system to be deposited elsewhere. The mammals include humans, which is why you will often find Brambles growing near old settlements built before sewers had been invented, I will let you join the dots.
Brambles are very successful because they don’t just rely on their seeds to spread themselves. The flexible stems will extend beyond the hedgerow and arch down to the ground as a stolon. When the growth tip reaches the ground it stops producing leaves and it takes root instead and a new plant begins to grow.
Apart from making delicious jam, blackberries are an important source of food for many creatures, from badgers and dormice that fatten themselves with the fruits in the autumn, to the tiny leaf miner insects that create mazy white tunnels in the leaves. If you want a successful wildlife area then Brambles can be an important element but, as with all ‘wild’ areas, they need managing or they will take over and swamp most other things.
Blackberries form in clusters at the end of mature shoots. The berry at the tip of the stalk is the first to ripen and the sweetest and fattest of the bunch, but the fruiting stems tend to die off after about three years and dead stems are of little value. If you have a Bramble patch then it is best to cut one third each year in succession, then you will have a mix of lush young growth and mature fruiting growth each year.
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