A Year in Pictures – Berries on a Brompton Grave

[swan_tower]

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I am not enough of a botanist to know what these berries are, but I liked the bright scatter they made across a grave slab in Brompton.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[genarti]

Looks like yew berries to me, though I'm not enough of a botanist to know if there's something else easily mistaken for those. What a neat picture!

[swan_tower]

Yew seems likely; it does have funerary associations. Thanks!

[genarti]

So it does! I always forget that, because for me all the associations are playing with the berries on the bushes outside our childhood home, and then washing my hands dutifully because of stern parental warnings about not eating them because they're poisonous. But they have a clear juice which will bubble out if you poke the berries with a pointy yew leaf, and as a little kid I found this endlessly fascinating.

A little googling tells me that the red parts of the berries are edible (though not necessarily all that interesting-tasting) but the seeds are extremely toxic. Today I've learned a thing! Guess I didn't need to take quite so much care about the aril juice after all, although it probably was a good idea anyway.

[juliet]

The leaves look like yew, as well. (And yew is commonly planted in graveyards.)

(And while reading about yews, I just found a ? 5,000 yr old yew tree in Wales: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llangernyw_Yew )

[3rdragon]

It looks to me like they might be yew, though I don't know if there are other things that look like yew that could confuse the issue.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yew was the consensus over on DW, which makes sense.