Meetings with plants: beauty berry
Bramble & Briar #69
Imagine only getting noticed once a year. One season, just a few short weeks, really, in which the world deigns to look your way, pay you a little attention, and venture the opinion that maybe, just maybe, you might be worth keeping around after all. I can’t help thinking things must be a bit like that for the beauty berry (Callicarpa bodinieri ‘Profusion’), a shrub whose Big Thing is to clothe itself in clusters of small, metallic purple berries as autumn fades to winter. They’re an arresting sight – one where you almost suspect some kind of nefarious shenanigan with a can of spray paint, like those blimmin awful painted heathers that start popping up in garden centres around now (these always remind me of the character Jill Masterson in the Bond movie Goldfinger, who suffocated to death after being sprayed head to toe in gold paint. Somewhat inexplicably, it must be said – humans don’t do the majority of breathing through their skin. Plants, including heathers, do). But the prolific and beautiful berries are the genuine article, no shenanigans required, and a bush full of them is something to behold. There’s good foliage colour too earlier in the autumn, so at least two seasons of interest, though no one plants this shrub for its leaves.
Maybe, and I like to think that this is the case, the beauty berry is a showy introvert. As the days shorten and we look for a little sparkle, it obliges by putting on a grand show for a limited run and then, when all the attention gets a bit much, it hides itself beneath a cloak of anonymity and fades into the background. Whatever works for you, I mumble, understandingly, passing by the potted specimen that’s been sitting on the patio table for a year, waiting for me to decide upon the perfect spot in which to plant it. Oh! I think I’ve just written the first of next year’s resolutions.
They do look spray painted too *suspicious face*
Mine has faded so far into the background that it has disappeared.