A thorn in my side
Long believed to be domain of elves and imps, the humble bramble’s story extends far beyond the hedgerow and woodland floor, finds Ian Morton
Ian Morton untangles the mythladen tales of brambles
IF no hedgerow was conveniently near, medieval folk fearful of vampires would reputedly plant a bramble close to the house and, at harvest time, place quantities of the fruit on the threshold. The bloodthirsty zombies were understood to be obsessed with counting the berries and, if sufficient were presented, dawn would intervene before the tally was completed and oblige them to return to their grisly grottoes without any sanguineous sups.
Assuredly, 2018 was a good year for blackberries and a bad year for vampires, as the season lasted week after heroic week with sweet and sumptuous yields.
Some bushes offer more than others. Local hedgerow harvesters will know which is most favoured and botanists have concluded that we have an amazing number of variants of a shrub that was once classified under the all-embracing Rubus fruticosus.
Studies of the bramble, a relative of the rose, have been deep and prolonged. Acknowledging earlier research
in Germany (the genus is truly international), Victorian botanist Charles Cardale Babington identified 41 variants and suggested there were more. He was right. Subsequent investigations have revealed more than 330, most of them localised virtually parish by parish.
The Cambridge-based Babington cited essential differences in stems, prickles and panicles, in leaves pilose or glabrous, in leaflets obovate and acute or cuneate, oblong, abruptly truncate and cuspidate—a language mystifying to the uninitiated. The botanical world duly affixed Latin tags, rightly including a Rubus babingtonia.
Rural folk had their own regional colloquialisms—thimbleberry, bumblekite, skaldberry, bounty thorn, moocher, blackbutter, blackbide, gatterberry, fingerberry, gouthead, brummel and more. As the roebuckberry, it was the badge of the Mcnabs and the cloudberry the emblem of the Macfarlanes.
Cynics referred to the bush as the lawyer —there was no escape once those recurved prickles had secured a grip—but wayside foragers knew that brambles were actually the domain of elves and imps and it was they who admonished the maladroit. The first fruits were, therefore, left for the Little People.
Some early Christians thought that the bramble provided Christ’s crown of thorns, the berries turning black in mourning and,
Changing from white to red to black, the berries were birth, life and death
in any event, they wouldn’t pick the fruits after September 29, Michaelmas, which celebrated the day that St Michael defeated the rebel Archangel Lucifer and threw him out of Heaven. The Devil landed in a bramble bush and was so angry that he spat on the fruit to render it uneatable in perpetuity after that date.
Another version had him urinating on it, although how even a fallen Archangel had the wherewithal for such a gesture was surely pushing supposition to the limits.
The ancient Greeks also had a tale of a painful tumble from on high. Bellerophon, a mythical hero and slayer of monsters, presumed to ride the winged horse Pegasus to join the gods on Olympus, but was thrown, fell into a bramble bush and was blinded by the thorns, ending his life in reclusive misery as a warning against arrogance.
The Greeks prized the blackberry as a remedy for gout and piles, all early northern cultures enjoyed it as food and the Celts regarded the bush as sacred and dedicated the 10th lunar month to it. Changing from white to red to black, the berries represented birth, life and death, as well as the three phases of their fertility goddess, Arianrhod, as maid, mother and crone.
In the medieval period, wreaths of bramble, rowan and ivy gathered at the full moon were hung in doorways to ward off evil and bushes were planted on new graves to bind the freshly turned earth and protect the deceased, although some believed that this would stop the dead from returning as ghosts.
On a practical front, bramble strands were used to secure thatch. It was believed that a small section of bramble stem picked under
Did they but know it, the bramble offered a potential symbol of American unification
a harvest moon or on September 21, the start of Mabon, the autumn equinox, was a talisman against poverty and a handful of leaves burned in the flame of a yellow or green candle would bring wealth.
The bramble was also endowed with the power to strengthen newborn children, who would be passed forward and backward three times under the arch formed by outreaching growth, as older people crawled through in an east-west direction, praying for help. Cows led over the same spot might also benefit, although the Irish believed that, if a bramble caught in a cow’s tail, someone was putting a spell on her milk. In his Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics
of 1884, Richard Folkard recorded that ‘to dream of passing through places covered with brambles portends troubles: if they prick you, secret enemies will do you an injury with your friends: if they draw blood, expect heavy losses in trade’.
Popular remedies found great medicinal value in the bramble. Nine leaves washed in running water were placed on burns, laid on with a reverential chant. Bruised leaves provided treatment for burns, sores, eczema, psoriasis and piles and were chewed for toothache and bleeding gums. Infusions treated sore throats, dysentery, diarrhoea, thrush, whooping cough, bronchitis, asthma, cholera and enteritis.
Bramble leaves boiled in lye treated itchy scalps and also provided a black hair dye. Such treatments may not have been totally in vain, as bramble contains tannin, iron, magnesium and vitamins A and C. The 17thcentury herbal scribes John Gerard and Nicholas Culpeper both recommended boiled bramble preparations and bramble tea was widely recognised as an antidote for dysentery well into the 19th century.
On a number of occasions in the American Civil War, ceasefires were called so troops on both sides could collect leaves. It’s said that suffering Union and Confederate soldiers picked from the same hedges at the same time. Did they but know it, the bramble offered a potential symbol of American unification.
Although the bramble fruit is universally known as the blackberry, strictly speaking, it’s not a berry at all, but rather an aggregate that’s made up of small drupelets. The flowers develop fruit and seed without fertilisation, a plant characteristic known as apomixis, and this has resulted in all those variants remaining localised.
The importance of this would appear to be considerable, as, according to 20th-century expert W. C. R. Watson, the humble bramble holds a key to botanical history. ‘On account of their relatively slow methods of distribution,
their hardiness and the consequent preservation of old forms, the Rubi afford perhaps an unrivalled instrument for ascertaining the movement and succession of florulas and floras if they are studied in connection with the climatic and geological changes of the past,’ he wrote in his Handbook of the Rubi
of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1958. Research into their geophysical significance is still in its infancy, he declared.
The world of the blackberry, its secrets still to be mapped, clearly stretches far beyond the ken of the hedgerow hunter, the kitchen practitioner and those happy souls who consume the good things that result.