Wimberry juice
must be in my blood. The purple life-flow of these delicious and much prized
little berries (original, wild and dainty sisters of the prostitute fat-cat
farmed Blueberry) has seeped through our young skin on the Shropshire hills most Augusts, in pilgrimage fashion.
There’s something
vaguely pagan in the annual ritual of these tiny magical spheres oozing their
wild and amethyst blood onto our keen fingers and staining them purple.
Anyway, when
they’re not busy keeping little foragers messy and the older ones happy with
nostalgia, they’re brilliant in puddings. We were lucky in mid-September to
find any at all, and especially so bearing in mind their current plight. Sadly,
this year they’ve caught a bug - some sort of horrid disease that’s not fully understood just yet. Some of the bushes have been sprayed with Glyphosate in
an early effort to harbor the nasty spread (hopefully not ours, but for once I
washed them). Happily we gleaned enough for a saucer pie…
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| Me and my sister Wimberry picking a long time ago and, more recently, a saucer pie. |