Up here north of the A40, wherever the brambles and hedgerows were not cut back too much earlier in the year, it looks as though the 2023 blackberry crop will be a good one. Elderberries too. And sloes are forming on the blackthorns. It always seems miraculous:
A Marvell Blackthorn and bramble tear and scratch
puncturing our tim’rous snatch;
but blackberry and powdery sloe
into our bowls will loathly go.
While doing research for his book Flora Botanica, Richard Mabey was told that in Eynsham, blackberries used to be “picked and sold to Coopers Marmalade of Oxford, who had the contract to make jam for the troops in the First War. Lots of local people did this to earn a few pennies. The fruit was taken into Oxford in an old pram.” I wonder if the Market Garden in Mill Street would be interested . . .
Brambles look distinctly unfriendly, especially in the winter months. You can always blot them out with a barrier of conifers, but, as another country writer, Ronald Blythe, pointed out, if too many conifers are planted together, they end up doing more than is required of them, “creating a sadness”. It is worth enduring the bleakness of winter brambles in order to enjoy their flowers and bees in spring, and their fruit in late summer.
Incidentally, I seem to have done quite a disservice to the land management plan for the L-shaped fields that once belonged to Corpus Christi College, by suggesting they might be sown with a “monoculture” of grass. A plant with yellow flowers has appeared, together with others such as spurge and “fat hen”. Could he, after all, have sown a mix of cover, soil-improving and wildlife-friendly crops?
When these fields were sown a few weeks ago, the public rights of way were also ploughed up. Happily, enough people have now walked along where they used to be to re-establish them. You may have been put off using them after the ploughing, but they are up and running again now.