By the bus stop, near the bridge, at the back of the industrial estate, along the garden fence . . . the seasonal memo is everywhere. Friends get called. While juveniles reclaim last year’s hexagonal jam jars from neighbours, adults rustle up boots, bags, and boxes. Because when starlings murmur, conkers fall, geese flock, deer rut, trees blush and fungi emerge . . . humans go blackberrying.
For the bramble, it’s already been a busy morning. It has been sung from by a robin, whiskered by an acrobating mouse and plundered by a mistle thrush who, knocking ripe berries to the ground, activated a sweet-toothed vole. And now it has an appointment with another forager; except that this one, from the sound of it, is travelling in a herd.
Leaving the main path, we head down a tiny track, catching up about bike rides, beaches and BBQs and who hasn’t got round to sorting out school uniforms. Our cubs, scurrying ahead, yelp with anticipation. They’re old enough now to know the way, because they came here last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and their internal map is bright with indelible landmarks. Here you fell in the mud. There we met the fox. By the stream, we sat in the lap of that massive oak, mum, mum, mum, mum, remember?
The bramble isn’t in favour of large mammals as they have a habit of eating young plants. Birds are preferable, a point the bramble makes clear by spacing out its thorns so that small feathery guests have easy access, and big hairy gate-crashers don’t. Compared to birds and small mammals, larger ones, with their slow moving stand-and-eat habits, are useless at – to put it delicately – ‘distribution’.
Someone tells a story about his grandmother and her ancient hooked stick. She kept it in the shed and only ever got it out to go blackberrying. Oh, how they loved the ritual! How she, stiff-hipped, would part the brambles with the stick and send him further into the thicket to collect the fruit she could no longer reach. How she would rinse the berries in the tin bath, while he designed this year’s labels.
A gut’s a gut, whoever it belongs to, but the bramble hands out its flavour-favours judiciously, dangling its bribes in a drip-drip of staggered ripening. Keep ’em hungry, keep ’em keen. An over-fed bird is, after all, a useless messenger, when it comes to spreading the bramble gospel. The remnants of the blossom still cling like down around the base of a small, green berry, a hard knobbly dome. You can hardly call it a blackberry at all; more like an after-flower; a fruit-to-be; a bramble-idea. Next to it hang other berries in various hues: clumps of mottled pink, scarlet, burgundy. Their colour is their cunning. Not this, it means. Not me. Not yet. Seek elsewhere.
Murmur and wow. All around, brambles sparkle with baubles. Our pack spreads out in an optimal foraging pattern, obeying the bramble’s code. Eyes register (but don’t see) the greens, hands brush past the reds and reach as commanded for the plumpest, blackest, juiciest treasure. Let the picking begin!
The bramble has already got the job started. While its green and red berries remain bound tight to its stems, the bramble has obligingly loosened the ripe ones. It throws fruit!
Sometimes we fumble the catch and the blackberries fall. Mostly, though, it takes just a gentle flick of the finger to beckon the berries into palms. Look, that one, and the next one, and those over there, the seduction of the prizes stronger than the punishment of the thorns. Tiptoeing and turning, we dance to the tune of the bramble. Silence falls, along with breathing and pulse rates. Never mind antioxidants, vitamins and fibre; here is health, and the eating hasn’t even started (except for one of our young, tucked in a sunny corner, berry-ink on her lips). Time slows down, speeds up. Bramble Zen.
The bramble draws blood. But its crop is decimated: we apes have been thorough. Tomorrow’s birds will have to fly further for their breakfast. The small mammals’ tummies will rumble, and the badger, hedgehog and fox won’t linger here tonight.
Tamsin Constable, 2016