Be not hasty to pluck it

Have we been picking blackberries wrong all this time? Ignore the birds and follow the bees for the ultimate hedgerow delight of summer's end, advises Deborah Nicholls-Lee

- Deborah Nicholls-Lee

IN August, the knotty brambles that wrap around our fields, woodland and lanes are ‘heaving’ with blackberries, wrote Sylvia Plath, ‘big as the ball of my thumb’ and ‘fat with blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers’. For Seamus Heaney, they are ‘a glossy purple clot’ ripened by the season that is drawing to a close. ‘Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it,’ he wrote in Blackberry Picking (1966).

Putting on a show from bright green to crimson and the darkest of blacks, the blackberry transforms our hedgerows in a final hurrah as summer segues into autumn. What is perhaps most striking about this fruit is its abundance: an invitation to gorge oneself to the point that lips and hands are stained purple. As the American poet Mary Oliver wrote in August (1983):

When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods,
in the brambles nobody owns,
I spend all day among the high branches,
reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer into my mouth

This act of gathering, this meditative pastime that goes back millennia, inspired Victorian artists, in particular. Painters such as Myles Birket Foster, Joseph Paulman, Walter Bonner Gash and Elizabeth Adela Forbes all depicted women and children blackberry picking against the beautiful backdrop of the British countryside. In these idealised works, there are no stained aprons or scratched limbs, but instead the unconstrained energy of children’s play. This device comes across in many of Foster’s paintings, including Children Gathering Blackberries (1899), which depicts girls crowding around a blackberry bush, grabbing at its thorny branches.