NATURE provides its own Christmas decorations, mostly in the form of berries which cheer up a cold bleak landscape. Here, ENHS member SUE LLOYD provides a guide to plants which can lift our spirits on a grey winter day.
Winter berries on trees and shrubs offer welcome splashes of colour on Exmoor and the surrounding countryside. Look out for rowan trees laden with orange-red berries, glowing crimson goblets of bryony or honeysuckle twining through bare hedges.
Stalks of wild arum brighten the hedge banks with their miniature red-berry towers and shocking-pink spindle berries provide glimpses of orange seeds.
Of course, the colourful berries are not provided by nature for our human benefit - that is incidental to her purposes. Reproduction is her aim. Now that their flowers have been pollinated, plants need to spread their genetic inheritance as widely as possible.
Their methods vary, but the one that gives us so much pleasure is that of concealing their seeds inside colourful berries which attract birds. The birds enjoy the tasty flesh and then excrete the hidden and indigestible seeds, often far from the original plant.
Not all berries are the same in botanical terms. The haws of hawthorns, for instance, are technically ‘drupes’ rather than ‘berries’ as they contain just one seed in a hard case inside their spongy interior.
Botanical ‘berries’ are also have a succulent outer covering, but they contain several seeds without hard cases. But for our purposes here, berries are the fleshy fruits delicious to birds and often to humans.
Elderberries, for instance, are delicious with stewed apples and cream. They can also be made into syrup or wine. We all know blackberries, delicious eaten straight from the hedge, but even better with stewed fruit, or made into jam or jelly.
Blackberry seeds have been found in the stomach of a Neolothic human, so we have been enjoying them for a very long time! But do not pick them after Michaelmas as, according to folklore, that is when the devil comes and spits on them!
The shiny red hips of our wild roses were a valuable source of vitamin C during the Second World War. They were collected by volunteers and processed to make rose-hip syrup, full of vitamin C, for the nation’s children.
The processing was necessary to remove the tiny stiff hairs surrounding the inner seeds, which could irritate the children’s intestines. Rose hips contain more vitamin C than any other fruit or vegetable - 20 times more than oranges!
This is not something to try at home without taking care that the tiny hairs inside the rose hip do not make it into the syrup. Children used to make itching powder from the ground-up hips.
Rowan berries have mostly disappeared by December, as birds love them, but they can be made into a dark orange jelly to eat with game or lamb.
In fact, most berries are not palatable to humans in their raw state - some are actually poisonous, such as yew berries. But to the birds for which the berries are intended, they are delicious and also an essential food during the winter.
Winter migrants in particular are drawn to berry-bearing hollies, rowans, whitebeams and similar trees. Large flocks of overwintering thrushes, such as redwings and fieldfares, may strip a whole tree and then move on.
They are often drawn to gardens, to raid cotoneasters, pyracanthus, berberis, guelder roses and similar berry-bearing bushes. Some gardeners plant such bushes on purpose to feed winter birds and to enjoy watching them as they feed.
Our autumns are changing due to the climate crisis and leaves that used to fall in October may still be on the branches in November. Autumn colours are often fleeting - one gale is all it takes to send the leaves tumbling down.
But holly berries, with their Christian connections, as the Oxford Carol reminds us, will still be there to delight us and provide us with Christmas decorations. After all, “Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown!”
For more information about the work of the Exmoor Natural History Society visit www.enhs.org.uk