Walking up the Chevin today, I couldn’t walk more than a few feet without being distracted by the amount of insect activity around the white and pink flowers of bramble. Its flowers provide much needed nectar and pollen now that the spring blooms have faded. So many of our pollinators rely on bramble now, including bumblebees, honey bees, hoverflies, wasps, butterflies, moths, flies and lacewings. Cunning spiders often spin webs in and around bramble to catch some of the bounty of visitors. Incredibly there are over 320 microspecies of what we call bramble, there’s so much to learn about it in fact there’s a name for the discipline of just studying bramble: batology. When the flowers of the bramble finally fade in the autumn, its other common name, the blackberry bush, becomes very evident and its value to wildlife keeps going!
By River Six