Rubus vs. Your Correspondent

Here is the latest score card:
Rubus 2;  Your Correspondent 3.

At last!  I'm ahead, albeit by the slenderest of margins.  The game isn't over yet, though - it's a very long-term contest, with fortunes ebbing and changing month by month, and year by year.

Team Rubus has two key players in our garden - the pernicious Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus), and its more agreeable accomplice the Loganberry (Rubus X loganobaccus).  The Blackberry, a ubiquitous weed of watercourse margins and bushland in south-eastern Australia is one of those wonderful examples of a plant enjoying its surroundings.  Well, more than enjoying them - as it turns out.

Introduced to Australia from Europe during the enthusiastic acclimatisation phase of our settlement in the mid-1800's, the Blackberry has become one of our more costly weeds to control.  The credit/blame for its introduction is usually ascribed to the famous botanist Dr Ferdinand Mueller - later Baron von Mueller - who we understand thought that it would be a fine thing to augment our natural flora and to provide sustenance for the wandering vagabond (I'm paraphrasing fairly heavily here).  In its favour, it does produce the most delicious fruit in late summer - which is eaten by birds and others, and the seed is further spread around the countryside.  Unfortunately (for the human), the canes and even the petioles bear unbelievably sharp thorns that can bring a grown man to tears.

Baron von Mueller possibly contemplating the successful acclimatisation of Blackberry in Victoria

One could actually buy Rubus fruticosus in nurseries in Victoria from 1855 until about 1873, when perhaps the more observant nurserymen might have noted that its novelty value was wearing thin, and its weed potential was on the rise.

Here in the home garden, your Correspondent wages a continuing campaign against the Blackberry to try to prevent it from taking over the shrubberies.  Generally dormant through winter (the plant, not me), it gets up and about through spring and becomes particularly brazen in summer - if there is any moisture about.  This year our summer has been very dry, which is not great for the garden in general, but is a blessing for putting a crimp in the jaunty step of the Blackberry.

Blackberry - the good bits.

Sensing that it was a little off its game, and emboldened by a new pair of man-sized leather gauntlets as protection, I have taken on the Blackberry thicket, and (I think) come out on top.  After trying various tactical approaches, my preferred play is just to grab the thorny canes, and heave them up out of the ground.  Yes, it is a little perilous, as the canes whip around and cause lacerations to any part of the body in their sweep, and yes, just spraying them out with your herbicide of choice would probably be more effective in the long run... but where is the fun in that?  Of course there are some roots left there in the ground, and they will shoot next year, and then we can face off again.

In the meantime, the thicket is gone, my scratches are healing, and I have uncovered some long forgotten things in the garden (eg. other plants).  While taking this battle up to the Blackberries, I have been fortified, quite regularly, by an enormous crop of juicy Loganberries from a suite of vines I planted a few years ago.  I bought them as raspberries, and had more or less given up on them - they had sulked for two summers - before springing into action this season.  

It became apparent that they weren't actually raspberries as they continued to grow large and ripen to almost black... Not raspberries, but Loganberries, then.
I now have learnt that the Loganberry is a variety bred either deliberately or by fortunate accident by a lawyer and horticulturist named J H Logan of Santa Cruz, California in 1883.  Its parents were believed to be the Rubus ursinus 'Aughinbaugh', and R. idaeus 'Red Antwerp'.  The Loganberries appear to enjoy our climate, including hot summers and fairly reliable frosts in winter.

Anyway, we have harvested bucket-loads of berries (no, they aren't technically a berry, thank you for pointing this out... they are aggregates of drupelets if you must know; true berries are single-ovaried, with the seed surrounded by flesh such as a grape), and the home team has eaten them by the handful.  I have even gone to the extent of netting them against the predations of our sharp-eyed birdlife (I can't for the life of me see how four little birds breached the net security and were flapping about inside the net... they seemed pleased to be released, which did rather suggest that it was misadventure rather than a well-planned raid).

So - in summary:  Blackberry thickets humbled, Loganberries producing magnificently.  I think, for once in many decades, that your Correspondent is every so slightly ahead in this game.