Is this the best year ever for berries?

The sunny, yet wet summer might have been a dampener at the time, but the resulting autumnal berry haul is a feast for mice and men

- John Lewis-Stempel

FROM holly in the field hedge to guelder rose at woodland’s edge, from rowan on the moor to buckthorn beside the shore, the land is bursting with autumn fruitfulness. By all anecdotes and estimations, it is a bumper year for berries, a ‘soft mast’ year, when the berry-bearing trees and bushes produce a glut, when the hawthorn cascades red with haws and the bramble is clotted with blackberries. The sloes are as big as grapes.

The wild berries of Britain rarely fail, but, every so often, there comes a bonanza crop. The reasons for such a berry rush are opaque (Nature likes to keep some secrets close to her chest), although weather and Darwinian continuation of the species have a role. A summer such as the last, both sunny and wet, enables berries to ripen and swell; the sheer number of fruits increases the odds of their seeds being distributed via the faeces of the gorging birds and beasts. Yet the making of abundance takes a toll on tree, bush and shrub, so years of über-bounty are occasional, not habitual.

Producing a plentitude, however, is insufficient for survival. A species of berry must stand out from alternatives if it is to attract a passing redwing or a mooching wood mouse. Consequently, each fruit has its architecture of temptation, its own design of enticement. The berries, ‘haws’, of hawthorn are the seductive scarlet of a 1950s starlet’s lipstick; the sophisticated, elongated hips of the wild rose are proffered like precious jewels in a Bond Street window. The sunlight glints on the blackberry as if it were a ballroom glitter ball. Bryony hangs as an unclasped necklace of green and red. And is there any fruit more sophisticated than the pink, four-lobed spindle berry?