If you’re anything like me, you’re a difficult person to buy gifts for. Being a plant person, I spend much of my time considering our collective future on this planet and attempting to resist the lure of overconsumption. But I’d be lying if I said I’m not tempted to ask for a fancy pair of thermal gloves or a well-designed harvest knife for Christmas.
However, the gifts I prefer to give and receive are – predictably – ones that grow and hold the promise of future abundance. Fruit bushes and canes are among the best of them. They are fairly low maintenance once established, high yielding in relation to the space they need, and result in much less of the plastic waste that inevitably comes with supermarket soft fruit.
Winter – when fruit bushes and canes are in a state of dormancy and bare-root specimens are available to order – is a great time to be thinking about summer fruit, whether you have a patch you’d like to add to or are establishing one for the first time. While it is possible to get fruit trees and bushes throughout the growing season, they will come in pots, which are more expensive than their bare-root counterparts, plus there will generally be fewer varieties to choose from. Try Ashridge, Scotplantsdirect or Victoriana Nursery.
Before you add your preferred plants to your Christmas list, plan out your fruit bed. You will need a relatively sheltered space that is free of perennial weeds and receives ample sunlight. This ensures that the plants produce blossom and are successfully pollinated, so they set fruit. If your patch is in partial shade, plant gooseberries, black, white and redcurrants as well as rhubarb.
Those lucky enough to have a perfectly sited spot in full sun can choose from the more traditional summer- and autumn-fruiting raspberries, cultivated blackberries and strawberries, or less conventional choices such as jostaberries and Japanese wineberries. I’m planning to create a fruit bush hedge filled with loganberries alongside my current obsession, tayberries, which are a sharply sweet, almost sherbet-tasting cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. Those with less space could look for dwarf varieties bred for small gardens and container growing.
If you know someone with an established fruit patch, you may be able to go gift shopping in their garden, as many of these plants are straightforward to propagate from. Every season raspberries throw out new canes, which can be dug up and relocated. Rhubarb crowns can be divided every few years, and blackcurrant prunings can be salvaged to propagate as cuttings that will grow into fruit-heavy bushes in a handful of years.
