A thorn in my side
There is one plant in my garden that comes back reliably regardless of the weather. It has strong stems and fresh foliage, popping up without any help from me. It needs no staking and scrabbles dextrously through the plants around it. Dotted in Summer with small creamy flowers maturing to rich berries by Autumn. Yup. It’s the bleedin’ bramble.
I haven’t always referred to it as a bramble. In my first year in this garden it was a blackberry and I ‘trained’ the stems we found against the fence so that we could enjoy the fruit. I know. It’s embarrassing. Little did I realise I was starring in a horticultural remake of ‘Jurassic Park’ and would end up a year later, wounded and bleeding, with a tear streaked face having lost good men along the way as I attempted to undo the hell I had created.
I say that we originally kept it for the fruit, but even this side of things was plagued from the start. One quiet evening Toby and I were cooking and picked a large bowl of blackberries for a crumble before attacking the apples. 15 minutes later we returned to the fruit to find dozens of maggots crawling over them. It turns out, if blackberries are left to drop on the ground year after year you end up with a lifecycle of fruit flies that can lay eggs in the flowers before the berries have even formed and without a lot of effort breaking the cycle your maggots are there to stay.
That night we removed as many maggots as we could, cooked the crumble for an extra 10 minutes and chased it down with a scotch, but it just didn’t taste as good as usual and I went to bed feeling uneasy. Guests began to notice when the lights were routinely dimmed before we served such fruit based delights as clafoutis, summer pudding or ‘blackberry surprise’.
That autumn we decided to dig them up before they got out of control. It’s not easy removing brambles. The process is perhaps best described in Samuel 23: 6-7, ‘Because they cannot be taken in hand; but the man who touches them must be armed with iron and the shaft of a spear and they will be completely burned with fire in their place’. We couldn’t resort to fire because I had eagerly planted up the borders already, but we made valiant effort with iron and spear (or shovel) and we hoped we had escaped, scratched and exhausted but in one piece.
As with the ‘Jurassic Park’ franchise, our brambles have since provided one sequel after another, each one largely similar to but more gruesome than the last. By our third spring I was too pregnant to care about what horrors dwelt at the back of the border and, without digging up everything we had planted, all we could do was to tackle it here and there as best we could. 5 years in we are still fighting. I am strongly reminded of the poor man stalked by compsognanthi in ‘The Lost World’: they may be small, but they bite, and while fending them off a few at a time is easy enough, every time you turn around there are more of them crowding behind you. It finally became apparent that, as in that harrowing scene, we would be worn down by gradual degrees and when we finally gave up, exhausted, there’d be a host of them ready to pounce.
And so, broken, this spring I checked over my shoulder to see that no one was looking and, with shaking hands, passed Toby a tube of Round-Up. I feel ashamed even to write the words and I know that this will meet with a lot of disapproval from organic gardeners. Glyphosate (or Round Up) is a systemic herbicide that is absorbed through the leaves and acts on the whole plant. It is also a carcinogen, and although results are mixed, there is some evidence that it can harm the balance of organisms and microbes in the soil. All I can say is that it was my first lapse and will hopefully be my last, and that at least in using the gel we have tried to contain it as much as possible.
A month on and those thorns are still snaking their way through the flowers and trying to put down runners, but they do seem to have lost some of their vigour and (with renewed application) the tips are turning yellow. Perhaps we are in for yet another instalment, but hopefully this will be a final battle, where we have the upper hand and our foe is fatally weakened. Lessons have been learned. Small, urban gardens are not the place for experimenting with thorny monsters, and some beasts were not meant to be tamed.
