The Fruits of our Labours

Blackberries suck us in with their sweet flavour, but little do we realise that we are being manipulated by the plant

The world of trees and bushes is awash with fruit, not least at Wilderness Wood. Don't you love picking apples or blackberries in August?

I know why I do it, but what's in it for the plant?

Well consider the process of me picking blackberries at Wilderness Wood. There they are sitting all nice and juicy on the bramble, as good as an advert on TV with these lyrics blasting out as a jingle:

“Eat me, eat me juicy and sweet,
You know you're worth it, so have a treat”

(sorry you'll have to write your own tune).

You succumb and pop one in your mouth and bite. You swallow and move on for another, and then another.

“To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

     With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,” John Keats

In my experience the seeds hidden inside the blackberry either get stuck in your teeth, or pass down your throat, into your stomach, intestines and down the toilet.

You may eventually get the seed out from your teeth and spit it onto the ground. Here it can germinate, potentially some distance from the parent plant.

Even better, if it passes down your toilet, wherever it ends up it is accompanied by a nice package of decomposing compost from your gut, making germination and growth into a new plant even more likely.

If you ever get chance to visit a large sewage works, do go. You will find the place awash with tomato plants which have been through the same process (I admit I didn't pick any of their fruit when I went on such a visit. Would you?).

So there you have it. Humans, birds and badgers all fall for the same trick - mugged into spreading millions of blackberry seeds all round the country.

Don't you love nature?

David Horne 26/8/2025