Brambles

I had a conversation once with a dear friend about whether brambles and blackberries are different fruits. My friend sought to assure me they are - but I've done research for today's blog and it turns out they are alternative names for the same thing. The bramble/blackberry is Rubus fruticosus - to give its official Latin binomial.

Geological evidence suggests the bramble originated in North America some time in the Eocene age, approximately 34 million years ago, before spreading - as brambles do - to the rest of the world. (Note to self: to read up on the fascinating origins of plant species when I have time).

brambles (or blackberries)

The bramble is fast-growing and tenacious. One can almost see its spiny tendrils reaching out to find new rooting sites, to bind onto whatever else it happens to encounter on the way. I have some brambles in my back garden. The flowers are pretty and bees seem to love them. I manage to collect about a saucepan full of juicy blackberries each year before the birds help themselves,

When I was a child living in Peterborough in the early 1960s, my parents used to take us brambling on Saturday afternoons in late summer in the local Huntingdonshire countryside. It was very rural, lots of quiet country lanes, wide grass verges, with huge stretches of tall brambly thickets around the edges of arable fields. We would go armed with step-ladders, walking sticks and buckets plus a picnic tea and would pick loads of fruit in an afternoon. One time my mother fell off the step-ladder into the brambles. We were shocked, but she'd never laughed so much. Our father untangled her with no harm done, save a few scratches. We all looked forward to bramble jelly and blackberry and apple pies.

Such bramble thickets and hedges can still be found in rural areas, but they are nowhere as numerous as they used to be and the grass verges have disappeared as road-widening schemes were introduced.  Sadly there are fewer places to park, to pick and to picnic than there were sixty years ago. 

As a curious aside, there is a bird called a brambling, but we never saw one when we were out foraging for  blackberries . And its name has nothing to do with brambles, being derived from the old English 'bram' and 'lyng' meaning loud lungs, for it is a mellifluous finch, and very pretty too. 

brambling

You're getting two poems, you lucky people. How could I not share Seamus Heaney's fabulous piece on theme?

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

                                                                   Seamus Heaney

My own latest by contrast has nothing to do with brambles, but is written in reaction to the latest thorny problem in the Middle East, namely Trump's 'war of choice' against the Iranians who've lived their whole lives under a kind of religious tyranny. I've shaped it as a concrete poem. I hope it retains its shape in your browser. Just for context, Shatranj is an early Persian form of chess, and the original 12th century assassins were from the region of modern day Iran.  

            Revenge Pawn

                      I'm
                  merely a  
                piece on this
               shell-shocked, 

               pock-marked
               shatranj board.

                        My 

              every move is
    constrained by conventions.
       Trapped between oil and
            ideology, my lamp
             no longer burns,
                my heart no
                more yearns.
                I have never
                truly found
             life. The light was
          elsewhere. So wrap me
        round in a suicide vest and

     point me  towards  that evil king.

Assassin now, I’ll  willingly do  the rest.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)