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Wildflowers of KY: is this blackberry winter? 2016-05-15 - Adair County, KY - Photo by Linda Waggener, ColumbiaMagazine.com (c). The cold snap we're going through must be Blackberry Winter. Finally found these in bloom this past week, with a visitor on one of the blossoms. Checking Blackberry entry in Wikipedia, disambiguated to cover the bramble fruit, we learned a lot we didn't know. For one thing the article says that the berries are not berries, but an aggregate fruit, if that makes one whit of difference in a cobbler, and that it is a science sin to call its prickles "thorns." So everybody might oughta do better and remember that. There's an ecological note, directed at misguided local counties' roadside poisoning programs, we guess, which can't be good for this natural food: Poorer crops are the result of fewer pollinators. Natural berries are harder and harder to find. No more are the days when, according to the late Varmintologist Dr. Billy K. Neat, the champion berry picker of all time, the late Cotton Durham, could "pick 55 gallons in one day, starting before daylight and stopping after sundown, armed with only a snake stick and a bunch of 50 lb. lard cans." And, as a precautionary note: Eating the delicious drupelets from anywhere the herbicide might drift might not be such a good idea. - EW Permalink | Comments?

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