I love how this plant flirts with us humans
dangling black jewels that some ancient part of us knows is sacred nectar.
Wading breast high to get to the big ones hung up in birch
I wonder, how did folk fare without jeans and sturdy boots!
In the heat of the day I’m in-sensed, intoxicated by the warm heady smell of hot ripening brambles and I dive in, knees at my ears and toes pulling down thick vines to be squashed under foot and robbed of their shiny black plunder. A solo strip the willow, kept in step by the sounds of the winds through the trees, birdsong, hunting keees, playing children and the drone of a far off helicopter.
After the bramble ceilidh, I have a late lunch in the shade of this young regenerating wood.
I’ve wrote about some of the ways we care for this woodland before – cut and mulch and stomp and mulch being two of my faves! In my quest to fill my bucket with woodland jewels I dance into our ‘wild’ area….a space we’ve deliberately not done anything to, in a bid to see what nature would do and if it’s best to leave her to it. Leaning into the head high bramble, what starts of as a peek turns into a swift arcade dance machine session, like the ones we did when we were dating, fuelled by deep drafts of buckfast.
For five minutes I’m engrossed, sweating and triumphant as I reach a crop of ripe berries. And then the mood turns as I’m joined by a baby robin and I panic – shit, have I just destroyed your home, your cover!
I make a guilty retreat.
From betwix the bramble trimmed area and not, I can see that leaving nature to it has resulted in trees about a meter taller but in fewer number. Single birch rather than the usual tight knit cluster.