Shocking pink in a winter hedge, as if blown from some forever summer place, it is a colour out of season. And yet the spindle berries are perfectly at home in wood margins and hedges on the limestone of Wenlock Edge. It seems the spindle tree – which can grow six metres (20ft) tall but is usually a shrub – has a minor but magical part in ancient woodland and here associates with ash, field maple and dogwood. It has waxy, serrated-edge leaves, greeny-white four-petalled flowers and these extraordinary lipstick berries, each a four- or five-valved pod holding orange fruits that ripen in November-December.
Spindle is a square peg in a round hole, or vice-versa: its green stems begin round, develop a corky bark to become four-cornered, then turn rounder with age. It is named after the stick used to spin and wind thread from wool. In the psycho-mytho-panto of Sleeping Beauty, the goddess is deceived, pricks her finger on the spindle of human ambition, and sleeps until she is woken up by the god of rebirth. It is a winter story.
The spindle tree’s Latin name, Euonymus europaea, translated as “good name” or “lucky” may be ironic; eating the berries or leaves, and even breathing the sawdust from its wood, could be highly unlucky. The orange fruits in the pink capsule contain alkaloids, theobromine and caffeinethat can induce a Sleeping Beauty coma, or worse; but for birds they offer the most nutritious of native fruits. The orange aril is rich in lipids, nitrogen and has the highest carotenoids content. Perhaps that is why robin redbreasts are spindle’s most effective distributor; eating the fruit and dropping or regurgitating the toxic seed helps it to germinate more successfully.
In the etymology of Euonymus also lies the character Euonyme, mother of the Furies, perhaps a personification of poisonous seeds, but maybe a joke at the expense of poor women whose lives depended on labour with the spindle.
For the moment, the little pink palaces dangle temptingly, baubles on a wind-shriven hedge that will drop in the next storm or snowfall.
Follow Country diary on Twitter: @gdncountrydiary
