Sloe berries don’t taste to me of their midnight colour or the bloom on their skins as blue as the sky might be high above this fog. To the touch they feel ripe enough, even though it’s warm and there’s no purging frosts yet. They roll smoothly in the mouth.
The first bite releases a bitter wave which sweetens into damson. Then, like wearing a gum shield, an anaesthetising astringency covers my teeth and gums.
Elderberries are almost all gone but there are a couple of bushes by the stile into the wood laden with tempting dangles. They are gritty sweet at first but with an aftertaste that takes me straight back to being seven and violently sick on elderberries.
Berries flash different messages to different eyes. To me holly berries don’t taste red (not like strawberries), but of dry-cleaning and wood; they are poisonous. Dog rose hips may be full of vitamin C but are just packets of seeds and itching powder. Hawthorn haws are all pip and pah!
The most intriguing berries are the scarlet swags of black bryony, which look so inviting and are very dangerous. Also called English mandrake or womandrake, bryony contains bryonin, a powerfully strong laxative that may not have been the intended alternative to magical visions. In my mouth a bryony berry instantly tastes wrong, turns saliva brown and makes the tip of my tongue tingle.
As I spit, it also makes me wonder how these beguiling fruits are perceived by the animals that do eat them. A hare, bolt upright from ear to haunch, stares into a field that opens under a mutation of redwings, fieldfares and thrushes just arrived from the north-east. These birds have come for the berry harvest. They turn fruit that is unpalatable or poisonous to us into flying power and broadcast seeds for the next generation of plants.
We are attracted to the same berries and yet must faff about before we can ingest them, or else we display their aesthetic qualities to each other. How much better are thrushes adapted to our world than we are.
