Shrubs & Bushes

The finest charcoal for the finest powder. A quiet tree with explosive associations.

The candle wax came first. The medicine followed the scent.

The berries taste of what they are: a little sweet, then bitter, then worse.

It takes payment in blood before it gives you the fruit.

It flowers before it leafs. It gives before it warns.

Smell it when you are knee-deep in Highland water and you will understand everything.

The handle was the metaphor. The plant was always the point.

Dark fruit that puckers the mouth and steadies the blood.

The spine-armored sentinel of the temperate rainforest floor.

Before the cultivated rose forgot itself, this was what a rose was.

Guardian of the threshold between worlds.

A thorned sweetness the English have always coveted.

When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion. It is never out of blossom.

Wisdom lives at the bottom of the pool where the hazelnuts fall.

The moor in August is a purple sound as much as a colour.

Crimson calyx holding summer's last warmth before the cold.

Sweet fruit of the threshold season, between spring's last frost and summer's first heat.

The berry that made gin. The smoke that cleared temples. The bush that hid the prophet.

The root that stills the tongue and loosens the soul.

The smell of it is a memory of somewhere you have never been.

It touches neither earth nor sky. That is precisely its power.

Beautiful beyond measure, lethal beyond doubt, it asks nothing of you.

Sweet fruit, thorned cane — the garden's most civilised bramble.

For remembrance. For the dead. For everything in between.

Pink and orange in October. The most dangerous colours in the hedge.

Evergreen in midwinter. Fragrant in January. Poisonous always.

A rose that smells of apples, with thorns that mean it.

It blooms when all else has surrendered to the cold.

A sentinel of thread and thorn, sewn into the earth.