a nourishing month with bramble
From late August into early October the hedgerows around the forest were laden with fruit, dark and sweet and oozing juice. So inviting, so prickly to collect.
Each autumn when the blackberries are ripe and I’m nine years old again. My dad, sister (five years younger) and me went to some scrubby bit of land along a path on the Eston Hills to pick brambles for a pie that we ate once a year.
It was a big deal. My mother cooked from packets and tins. Convenience was de rigueur. At the end of summer she made tomato soup from the fruits my dad grew in his little greenhouse. It was a chore on the scale of hard labour to mum, so most of the tomatoes went to a local greengrocer, including the yellow ones dad was so proud of, such a novelty in 1970s Teesside. On Sundays there was the ‘palaver’ of roast beast. Usually a lamb chop, almost burnt to the crisp to kill ‘germs’, served with tinned peas or carrots and potatoes (preferably tinned except when those dad grew were inconveniently available).
In autumn there was one bramble and apple pie — oh, the inconvenience! Bramble picking was a ritual. We came back scratched and smeared with purple-black juices, mum bewailing the mess as I plunged the fruit into cold water, picking out bugs and maggots as she smoked and intoned her disgust. I loved those pies — from getting in the car for this precious annual ritual to trying to pick the squishy fruit without ending up daubed in streaks of plum and purple, my hands prickled and blood-spotted, my mouth a dark stain, clothes spotted with the evidence.
I love them still, fleshy and succulent, the jam-bright hues mingling with stewed apples from our orchard. I’ve spent the month with blackberry, aka bramble (Rubus fruticosus, family:Rosaceae).
Like all herbs of the rose family, she’s a rich and layered plant. We’re familiar with her as a perennial shrub who thrives in hedgerows, field edges, and disturbed ground. A shrub with extraordinary tenacity. Every part of her is medicinal — leaves, young shoots, buds and flowers, fruit, and bark of the roots. And her fruit and leaves, particularly, have been medicinally important for centuries in Celtic traditions. She is full of tannins, fruit acids and vitamin C. And her energetics are cooling (especially the berries); drying and toning (particularly the leaves and root).
She’s astringent, tightening and toning tissues to reduce inflammation and excessive secretions. This makes her an ally for diarrhoea, mouth and throat inflammation, and hemorrhoids. She’s a tonic for mucous membranes, venous walls and skin and an inflammation modulator who soothes sore throats, ulcers, or wounds (especially as a tea or mouth rinse). Her berries are rich in anthocyanins, flavonoids, and vitamin C, so support cardiovascular and cellular health and are antioxidant. And she packs iron and minerals as well as the vitamin C, making her a blood-building ally in recovery. Additionally, both the berry leaves and fruit help regulate blood sugar and improve insulin sensitivity.
Traditionally, bramble is beneficial as a
- Gargle or mouthwash for gingivitis or mouth ulcers.
- Infusion or decoction for diarrhoea or intestinal inflammation.
- Berry syrup or jam as a tonic in convalescence.
- Leaf tea as a postpartum tonic or for menstrual balance (toning, cooling and restoring tissues).
Throughout this month I’ve spent time with a tea and an elixir. I’ve walked in the forest and stopped by the winter shrubs. Cooling, stabilising and grounding, it’s easy to intuit why she embodies resilience and boundary medicine, this grow-anywhere flexible wood with roots and tendrils that refuse to budge, expansive and sharply protected.
Our ancestors have known her for thousands of years — her seeds found in the stomach of a Neolithic man dug of in Essex. Later her tendrils were used for weaving early beehives (skeps), her berries for wine and beer as well as food, though were not harvested after Michaelmas when the devil peed on the berries, turning them sour or mouldy.
an dris bennaicht (the blessed bramble)
blackbutters
blackbides
bumblekites
scaldberries
blackberries
bramble
She’s food and medicine and vital to animal and plant life. Her protective web of thorns provides safe space for wrens, robins, blackbirds, thrushes. Her berries feed foxes and badgers as well as the birds. She is home to small mammals and grass snakes. She is a haven for insects and crucial to pollinators. Her protective arms keep deer from gnawing young oaks, birches and willows, allowing them time to establish. She is not afraid to appear wild and unkempt as she protects and fruits, prolific, creative and abundant.
This year has gone in a blink. We say that a lot in these times, I think. But this year has been Cinnamon Press’s twentieth anniversary. I thought I’d prepared myself for the two months of travelling and events and the amount of logistics that would go into organising two series of live events after five years with none. I had not. Neither had I reckoned with adding this work and travel to mentoring, a writing community, writing posts here, finishing a memoir, slowly setting up a herbal practice, and handling the logistics of the next big phase of renovation on our house, complete with the grant forms in all their labyrinthine bureaucracy. Who would? And who would have forseen the icing on the cake of a lupus diagnosis?
It’s been a full year. So much blessing, but sometimes that sense of feeling scattered and drained. And along comes humble, powerful, blackberry, who knows when to nurture, when to be spiky, when to open, when to say no, how to reclaim containment and direction. She is an earth spirit, but with a good dose of water — grounded but flowing, resilient but full of feeling. And simply to look at her — the tangled tendrils, the arching branches that can trip and ensnare. What are your tangled patterns, where are you stuck? she whispers.
From the doctrine of signatures her thorns shout boundaries, while her rich berries sing nourishment. I sip the tea, take tiny amounts of elixir each night before sleep. You do not have to do it all, you do not have to be overwhelmed and exhausted in order to offer sweetness to the world.
In the forest she grows along hedges and edges. I have always been attracted to edge places. I grew up on the edge of a sea, spent 20 years in Blaenau Ffestiniog (’blaenau’ means edge), on the edge of a village that was the edge of mountains. And now I live on the edge of forest in a Finistère — the edge of the world (’finistère’ meaning edge/end of the land). Thresholds and liminal spaces.
Writing the memoir made me realise how much time I’ve spent in such spaces — physically and emotionally. And they are fruitful spaces, places where ideas and states and stories intersect. Places of pause. Places to connect with the fertile dark as winter approaches. In the forest now the brambles are leafless, twisted mazes of arcs and cirri, deeply earthed and resting.
This has been a long year and it’s not done with us yet. So much blessing in a world where so many have so little. But the wisdom of bramble is unassailable — there is a season for all things and the late autumn has been a good time to be nourished by this generous herb, to go into December ready to pause and refresh.
Blackberry elixir
Brambles, flowers, dried leaves, brandy. (Rubus fruticosus)
Half fill a litre jar with blackberries. You can use fresh or defrost frozen or dried.
Add around 20g of leaves and you can also add in dried bramble flowers, and a bit of root or bark if you have access to some. But the fruit and leaves are fine.
Fill with brandy, leaving a little room at the top so you can shake it daily and keep in a cool cupboard apart from its daily shake unit the next full moon. Then strain and store in dark glass bottles.
If you don’t use alcohol, make the elixir as a vinegar and you can either use this as it is in soups and stews to add depth or combine 2 parts strained vinegar to 1 part honey to make an oxymel. See more information about vinegars and oxymels here.