Brambles can be beautiful!
Ornamental varieties of this muchmaligned plant deserve a spot on any plot, and they can be planted now
Brambles. We love them for their luscious fruit, we hate them for their vicious thorns. But there’s far more to brambles than that. Along with the hedgerow blackberries, garden raspberries and tayberries, an unexpectedly varied range of other plants all come under rubus.
There are varieties with colourful stems that rival the dogwoods for winter colour. A few have unexpectedly eye-catching summer flowers and there are even mouth-watering raspberries with attractive colourful foliage. A couple make very effective low ground cover and there’s even a blackberry that looks pretty in hanging baskets
– and a few without prickles, too! In general, these are tough and adaptable plants that often develop into clumps by their spreading suckers – just think how raspberries always try to break away from their neat rows. But this tendency to spread also gives us clumps that are quick to establish and the more the colourful stems are crowded together the brighter the impact.
The low and creeping evergreen ground-covering types will take a wide variety of soils and situations. In fact, pretty much without exception, these are tough and resilient plants that are easy to propagate by removing suckers of root stems. They may not be the first plants to come to mind when you look to fill a space in your borders, but take a closer look.