Autumn colours and textures always grab me, with the season's fire bright hues casually spread across the city scape. Leaves that were once smooth and supple, are now brittle and crunchy. Berries bloom. Plump clusters of red, orange, black, blue, white, studding the branches and bushes. Adding new and pleasurable dimensions to my walks.
One that I look forward to is pyracantha. It spills orange over garden walls, bunched up and bright. The fire of its name glows in reds, oranges and yellows. A hellish pain too if you're unlucky enough to be jabbed by its thorns. Originally from East Asia and the Mediterranean, it was brought to Britain for its colour through the cold months, dense hedging, and berries that attract birds, who strip it clean over winter when food supplies are low.
Ivy, that great green cascade of a vine that borders every path in south-east London, and climbs numerous walls, flowers in September and October, late and generous, one of the last nectar sources before winter draws in. Starburst umbels, the berries forming hard and green on reddish stems.
On the same walls, another persistent climber. Virginia creeper: five-fingered leaves flushing scarlet, and heavy sprays of blue-black berries on blood-red stalks. North American, poisonous to humans, delicious to birds.
Early holly berries, still greenish and dull, with weeks of ripening still ahead. A piece of folklore says a heavy crop of holly berries predicts a hard winter. The fruiting trees (so the story goes), preparing the birds for what's coming. However, the science tells us that a good holly year has more to do with the previous spring's weather and pollination than anything on the horizon. But I like that people looked at holly and saw a forecast. That they wanted the berries to be a message, rather than just fruit.
What I humbly believe gives us the best colours of the year is, to a blackbird or a wood pigeon, a calorie map. Berries exist because a plant needs help moving its seeds somewhere better than directly underneath itself, and colour is the advertisement. Red and orange against green foliage is about as visible as a plant can make itself. Every hedge I captured this autumn had something moving in it — wings, or the low hum of a late wasp still working the ivy flowers before the cold shuts that down too.
Proof is in the elder. Mine (tucked up beside my neighbourhood churchyard yew) was already stripped to bare red stalks. Folklore says an elder has a spirit in it, an Elder Mother, and you should ask before you cut one. The berries are for cooking, into syrups and wines.
Brambles are the one true native generalist in this set. The democratic blackberry, free for the taking, growing upon waste ground or garden, eaten by everything, including us.
Dog rose is the native rose of the hedgerow, trailing through with slimmer, oval hips. It carries its own folklore. The "dog" in its name may come from an old belief that its root could cure a rabid dog's bite — Pliny the Elder tells of a Roman soldier saved that way, after his mother dreamed of the root — or it may simply be "dog" as in worthless, a poor relation of the garden rose. Children used to call the hips "itchy-backs" or "itchy-coos," splitting them open to get at the fine hairs around the seeds and drop them down each other's collars. And in wartime Britain, with citrus imports cut off, rose hips were gathered by the hedgeful and boiled into a vitamin-C syrup handed out to children, a genuinely useful piece of foraging.
Hawthorn, the old hedge workhorse. Small dark-red haws, mealy and plain, and a feast for the thrushes, redwings and fieldfares arriving from the north. Its blossom is meant to be unlucky indoors, and a lone hawthorn was once left standing because it belonged to the fairies.
But a good number of these berries aren't native at all to this British land. The rose hips in my photos, for a start. These are rugosa, the Japanese rose: fat, glossy, squat and shaped like tiny tomatoes, which is where the nickname "beach tomato" comes from. Hips running the full spectrum from yellow-green to orange to a hard shining red, sometimes all on the same stem, the ripening written out like a diagram. It came from East Asia as a tough, salt-proof, thorny shrub, planted on verges and in car parks, and it has since escaped onto sand dunes. The hips are rich in vitamin C too, so it's a foragers' fan favourite.
Snowberry, that strange ghost-white cluster that looks almost fake against everything else, is North American, planted originally as cover for game birds and now gone slightly feral in odd corners of the city.
Oregon grape, its spiky leaves which I mistook for holly, a dusty blue-black under a powdery bloom, is also North American. It may be called a grape but is not to be eaten like one — though, in fairness to the name, the berries are genuinely edible, just not in the way you'd eat an actual grape. They're sharply tart, closer to a sour cranberry than anything sweet, and almost always cooked down with sugar into jam or jelly rather than eaten raw off the branch.
Cherry laurel: glossy black beads on upright stalks, from the Black Sea region, planted for thick evergreen screens. Crush a leaf and it smells of almonds, thanks to compounds in the leaves and stones that can release hydrogen cyanide. Those are the dangerous parts. The flesh carries far less, which suits the birds, who eat it and carry the stone on.
A street tree I'd walked under for years without noticing the berries. Swedish whitebeam: grey-backed leaves that flash silver in the wind, then heavy red clusters in October. A cousin of the rowan, the tree once planted by doors against witches. Britain has its own whitebeams on chalk, but this one came from Scandinavia as a street tree.
Cotoneaster, caught mid-change, the berries still blushing from green to red. From the Himalayas and China, planted for hedges and for birds, and some have escaped into the wild. In a hard winter, waxwings sometimes arrive and strip them.
Viburnum tinus, with its slow-motion clusters running pink to blue-black on the same flat-topped head, is Mediterranean. Sea buckthorn: narrow silver leaves, small violently orange berries clinging straight to the stem, sharp enough to draw blood if you're not careful reaching past the thorns — is actually native here too, though usually to coastal dunes, not this stretch of London hedge it had found its way into. Sour, edible, packed with vitamin C, one of the few things in this whole set that people genuinely harvest and press into juice, rather than just leaving for the birds.
So it's a mixed hedge, a multi-culti hedge, a hedge for all purposes. Native and introduced, toxic and edible, ornamental and useful, all growing into each other along the same few streets, planned and unplanned, arranged by birds who ate a berry somewhere else and carried the seed here in their gut. Squirrels too, they bury far more than they ever dig back up, foxes and badgers pass blackberry and rose hip seeds through whole and undamaged after a night's foraging, and wood mice cache what they find in their own small hoards. Most of what seems to just spring up along a hedge has, in one way or another, already journeyed through something with a little heartbeat.
Somewhere in me is the instinct to sort all this efficiently, by colour, or size, or use: edible, toxic, decorative, foraged. I reckon somebody (maybe a cool botanist) almost certainly already has, properly, with Latin names in neat columns. I am not that person. This is sixteen-odd species on a few streets in SE London, noticed because I happened to be looking, with plenty more berries still out there that I have yet to come across.
