Pink-flowered bramble, Rubus fruticosus. Jubilee Country Park, 1 July 2011. |
This is a bramble flower. Brambles, which give us our crop of blackberries in late summer, are a complex of microspecies and so vary quite a bit; most of them have white flowers. They grow vigorously on poor soils and are early colonisers of woodland clearings, which is what gardens are like, ecologically speaking, with predictable results. Butterflies love the flowers, and the fruits are a valuable food resource for small mammals and insects.
I didn't know all those berries were so closely related. Also, I've never seen the pink blossoms here. In Eugene, OR, lining the alleys, they made impregnably dense and thorny hedges (as well as giving me all the blackberries I could both eat and preserve), and feral animals bore their young in perfect security. We had more feral cats than you could imagine.
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ReplyDeleteThank you for your excellent, unique and original article. I've tried to locate clear information on this topic many times. You have helped make this interesting as well as clear. The thorny what is a bramble and embracing bushes. Shak.
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