Bees and the Bramble

An old lean-to covers our yard, put up by a previous owner long before we arrived. It shelters us from the rain, softens the winter frost, and casts a small square of shade through the summer months. Beneath it sits a weathered table and two chairs. We drink our tea there often, watching the weather arrive and depart.

Somehow, a bramble found its way between the fence and the roof. Now it scrambles across the old timber with tenacious, spiked tendrils, reaching, reaching, always reaching. In summer it is starred with flowers the colour of flushed cheeks, pale pink against the green. It seems almost impossible to stop, it is always setting out for somewhere.

I find something storybook about them.

Brambles are characters.

Sleeping Beauty slept for a hundred years while the brambles grew around her palace. They made it other. Hidden. Difficult to reach. They wove their enchantment so tightly that only a blade could cut a path through. They kept her safe but barred the way.

I let brambles grow along the edges of my garden. I do not mind a little enchantment.

But the lean-to is crumbling now. The wood is old and softened. It needs replacing. And yet every time we talk about it, we find ourselves looking at the bramble.

The bees adore it. Honeybees visit from morning until evening, working the flowers with a single-minded devotion. Their low hum has become part of summer itself. Later will come the blackberries, and with them the blackbirds. I can already picture the dark flash of an eye among the leaves, the quick movement of a beak, the berries disappearing one by one.

This bramble was a pioneer. It climbed out across the roof in search of light and, in doing so, created a small world. Bees. Blackbirds. Beetles. Spiders. A hundred tiny lives sheltering among its thorns.

So the lean-to will have to be a winter job.

When the flowers are gone and the berries eaten, we will cut the bramble back and replace the old wood beneath. It seems only fair to wait.  Besides, I know the bramble will return.

That is what brambles do.

They reach.

And so, for another summer, the lean-to continues its slow collapse while the bramble flowers above it, alive with bees. And standing beneath them both, I find myself wondering which is the stronger thing: the timber built by human hands, or the wild green stem that saw an opening and simply kept growing towards the light.