A wet day in Shropshire, and I’ve taken
the hint from the weather and come indoors to write about the garden, rather than be out in it carrying out the
seasonal tasks I’d intended doing.
It certainly has been a bumper year for
all sorts of fruits and berries. Surprising really if you think back to how
late plants were in getting underway after that long, cold spring, which seemed
to be going on forever. The yew berries have now continued that trend by not
being quite ready for the birds, which prefer them as food above all other
berries when they are available. Luckily for the birds, though not for the
appearance of my garden, they’ve had pyracantha and rowan berries aplenty to
tide them over whilst they’ve been waiting.
Berries have always been an important part of
decorations at Christmas time, though for a long time the Church, itself, didn’t
encourage the use of evergreens such as holly, ivy, laurel and mistletoe for
such a purpose, because of their association with pagan practices in this
country which pre-dated Christianity by centuries.
Nor might they have taken so readily to another
pagan custom, this one brought to us from Sweden by the Vikings, which involved
people cutting down two pine or fir trees, setting them up outside the entrances
to their houses and decorating them with candles, fruit and ornaments to mark
the passing of the shortest day, if Prince Albert, the German-born consort of Queen
Victoria, who probably had Viking blood of his own coursing through his veins,
hadn’t given the practice respectability by adopting it himself.
In the garden, look out for the scarlet berries of Ilex
aquifolium ‘Pyramidalis’, a dense female holly tree which is one of the few
hollies which doesn’t require both a male and female plant to be present to
provide cross fertilization before it can bear berries. Most hollies are unisexual,
so they do.
