There’s a new addition to the series of BSBI Handbooks: we are delighted to
announce that Brambles of Scotland is published this month. BSBI members will be able to benefit from an exclusive
introductory offer of £13 (excl. P&P) which will save them £7 compared the
RRP of £20. This offer opens on 21 April. I spoke to Angus Hannah, the author of the new Handbook, to
find out about his botanical back-story and how he became interested in
brambles.
LM: Before we start talking about Brambles of Scotland, could
you tell us a bit more about yourself please? Regular readers will know you as BSBI’s County Recorder for the Clyde Islands (vc100) and author of
the Isle of
Bute Flora, for which you received the Presidents' Award in 2019. So, how did you get started as a botanist?
AH: That goes back to my undergraduate years at St Andrews
finding spring flowers along the Ladebraes. A sign by the pond read ‘Wild
flowers are planted here, please do not pick’. The paradox of the first half
amused me; the implication of the second half, that it would be fine to pick
them if they had been truly wild made me wonder about conservation. In those
days senior students had free access to the Library stacks and though the
botany department was inactive there was a good shelf of older books from before
1847 when the University sold its birthright as a copyright library. Sowerby’s English Botany had much
better illustrations than Collins Field Guide, and was my companion on many
field trips to the Kinkell shore and Tentsmuir.
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Picts' Bramble R. pictorum, showing the intense colour which the stems can develop in full sun Image: M. Harding |
LM: So, what drew you to brambles (Rubus) as a genus? We all
know what a bramble looks like and we certainly enjoy eating them in pies and
crumbles, but may not realise that there are many different species.
AH: In my first decade as BSBI’s County Recorder for Clyde
Isles I made no progress with brambles, and only the gentle persistence of my
retired predecessor Tony Church, who had mastered the Arran brambles, finally
persuaded me to have a go. He assured me that as long as one stays local they
are not all that difficult, helped me with photographs, and even came to Bute
to guide me in the field.
When I identified the Picts' Bramble Rubus pictorum (new to Bute) from the description
in Edees & Newton’s Brambles of the
British Isles, while Tony was still puzzling over the specimen, I felt I
had got over the first hurdle. But there were many more! Not every
species matched its description so well.
At that time, I was recording every
monad (a 1km x 1km grid square) for my Isle of
Bute Flora, and this gave me an opportunity to look at all the island
brambles in detail at different seasons, making me familiar with about 15
species and providing the best possible grounding before I ventured more widely.
LM: So, what made you decide to take the leap from liking and
recording members of this genus to taking on the mantle of being a BSBI Handbook
author? Did you put yourself forward or were you encouraged by fellow
botanists/ batologists?
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Angus (on left) and Chris Miles examining brambles in Dumfriesshire Image: M. Harding |
AH: It was dire necessity! Having been appointed the BSBI’s
expert Referee for Scottish Rubus by default in 2023, as the only person in
Scotland who knew anything about brambles (even if not very much) following the
sad loss of George Ballantyne
and then David Welch, there was
no one else to write it, and I knew that without an illustrated field guide
there was no future for Rubus studies in Scotland.
I had been holding annual
meetings around southwest Scotland with a few Scottish enthusiasts to look at
the local brambles, and from time to time we would all say ‘if only there were pictures,
it would make such a difference!’ But who could write it?
One day, browsing John
Richards’ recent Field
Handbook to British and Irish Dandelions, I suddenly saw how it might be
done. We have far fewer bramble species in Scotland than there are British
dandelions. I could afford to give a double page spread to each, text and map
on one page, photos on the other, and so the idea took form. At this stage it
was a purely private venture, a simple field-guide for Scottish beginners in
brambles; I had no thought of it becoming a Handbook.
But how could I get photos of every species? Looking over
the records in the BSBI Distribution
Database, I noticed that several counties in Scotland had almost no
localised bramble species records, despite having plenty of brambles.
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Flower of Eagle's Talon Bramble R. infestus Image: C. Miles |
Most
obvious in the southwest was Dumfriesshire,
and so I enquired of the County Recorder, Chris Miles, if he, or one his local
group, might send me a few photos of brambles they met with on their jaunts,
some of which I might be able to identify. In this way, I could get photos and
he could get records. His amazing response was 160 sets of photos over the
season, yielding more than a hundred new records.
At the Scottish
Botanists’ Conference in November 2023 I exhibited a poster about this and my proposed
guide book, showing a sample page,
and Liz Kungu, BSBI Handbook Editor, suggested I might consider making it a
BSBI Handbook. I had not thought of this, since it was limited to the brambles
of Scotland and was only intended for beginners.
Liz felt it would have broader
interest, for instance to visitors, and it might encourage similar volumes for
other parts of Britain and Ireland.
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Leaf of Eagle's Talon Bramble R. infestus Image: C. Miles |
In the course of researching and writing I learned a great
deal more about brambles, my enthusiasm for them increased, and the book grew
from the simple beginners’ guide I had envisaged into a fully-fledged Handbook
with quite a comprehensive introductory section discussing many aspects of
their ecology and distribution as well as a more concise summary of morphology,
taxonomy and modes of reproduction. It also includes a history of Rubus
recording in Scotland, with detailed emphasis on the last half century. After
this comes a gallery of photos illustrating the numerous characters needed for bramble
identification, along with full explanatory text and two keys, followed by the
species accounts and a series of Appendices, the first giving brief notes on 30
further species recorded from Scotland only very rarely, and with no
confirmation of their continued presence. Many of these are illustrated by specimens
from Newton’s collection in the Herbarium in Manchester Museum, very kindly found and passed on by David
Earl. Refinding any of these 30 species becomes part of our ongoing Scottish bramble project.
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Angus (on left) and Caspian Richards examining bramble specimens Image: M. Harding |
LM: So, the Handbook is 220 pages long, and covers 56 species
in depth, with a further 30 noted more briefly. How many are native and how many alien? And how many are new taxa, described by you or a fellow batologist?AH: There are three cultivars of uncertain origin (certainly
Scottish neophytes),
and four or five others among the 56 are adventives, recently introduced
accidentally from England, as are the majority of the 30 additional species. All
the rest might be considered native to Scotland, though brambles have such a
close symbiosis with humans that it is impossible to know if some might be
better called archaeophytes.
A few are endemic to Scotland, and may be assumed to have arisen here; the
rest are migrants, arriving from the Continent as the cold lessened but
probably in most cases before sea-levels rose, greatly enlarging the North Sea.
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The "showy white flowers" of R. longiflorus, photographed in 2020 in Kincardineshire by the late David Welch |
Only two are recently described species: R. newtonii, published by George Ballantyne
in Watsonia in 2002 and R. longiflorus published
by David Welch in British & Irish Botany in 2021. For reasons I explain
in the Handbook, unlike botanists in general, we are parsimonious in the
publication of bramble species, and usually require evidence of a range
extending over about 30 km before this would be considered.
Further species
might be published if some taxonomic problems can be resolved: a couple of our ‘species’
are almost certainly aggregates, and several share the name of an English
species with which they may not in fact be conspecific. But much work remains
to be done before any of these could be published under a new name.
LM: Indeed. Could you give us an example please of one of
the 56 species you cover and what we can expect to find out from the new
Handbook about its identification, distribution and current status?
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The Reay Bramble R. hartmanii in Caithness Image: Joan Docherty |
AH: No bramble species has any conservation status, but every species has an interesting story. Perhaps the
simplest, as it is the rarest species among the 56, is what I call the Reay bramble R. hartmanii. As currently understood, this species has a very abnormal distribution. Described in 1832 from a
small stretch of the Baltic coast south of Stockholm, it was unknown elsewhere
until a sizeable colony considered to be the same species was found in the
Weald of Kent. In 1972 Newton found a bush which he identified as this species
on the north coast of Scotland at Reay in Caithness, where it had been thought
to be too cold and exposed for brambles to grow, and he didn’t expect it to
survive for long. George Ballantyne checked up on it in 1982 and reported it to
be thriving, as did David Welch in 2015. A resident of Bute who travels
regularly to Dounreay for work kindly agreed to obtain the photos I needed if the
Reay Bramble was to be included among the Scottish residents, a status it
seemed to deserve after more than half a century.
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Angus & Carol Crawford look up at a giant R. ulmifolius with Arran (one of the lovely Clyde Islands) in the background Image: M. Harding |
Edees & Newton suggest that it
was probably bird sown, but as I explain in the introductory section, this is exceedingly
improbable, and as it is on the edge of a small plantation it is most likely to
have been imported along with the trees, though some connection with the nearby
nuclear plant cannot be ruled out. The text offers a detailed description to
supplement the photos, but confusion with any other species is unlikely, since
no other brambles currently grow in the vicinity. Its continuing prosperity,
however, indicates that neither cold nor exposure is the reason for this
absence; as I explain in the book the paucity of brambles in the north of
Scotland, and more generally in the uplands, owes little to climate but is a
result of the Highland Clearances and subsequent intensive grazing by sheep, and later
deer too, which, combined with the loss of their natural dispersal vectors, makes
them dependent on human agency for recolonisation.
LM: So in the Handbook you're helping us understand how these plants arrived and continued to prosper in their various locations, as well as how to identify them. You must have visited a lot of locations across Scotland
in the course of your research. Are there any that particularly stand out in
your memory?
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Angus on a bramble meeting with Anne Middleton & Michael Philip Image taken by "a friendly anonymous artist" |
AH: When I began the book the 2023 season was nearly over. A
month earlier I had recorded the brambles of Colonsay with Anne Middleton, which
taught me that brambles are tolerant of exposure but not of grazing. I had no
plan then to write a book so soon, and despite having collected photos over the
years, there were many species for which I had no pictures at all. The
distribution of these dictated the places I would need to visit in 2024, except
where a friend could be found to identify and photograph them for me.
That
summer’s bramble meeting was planned for Dumfriesshire, and with Chris Miles
guiding us to some of the sites he had photographed the previous year, we were
able fill a few gaps.
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Angus & the team examining Elegant-petalled Bramble R. polyanthemus in Ayrshire Image: M. Harding |
With Michael
Philip I planned an expedition to the north-east, and with help and
hospitality from David
Elston we managed to see and photograph a dozen species unfamiliar in the
southwest. Caspian Richards sent pictures from East Lothian and Berwickshire; I had a short visit to Stirlingshire with Matt
Harding, one to Kintyre and a couple
to Wigtownshire; Ian Green sent
photos from Moray, Paul Smith from Lewis and Harris, and gradually the
gaps were filled.
Later, as already mentioned, David Earl sent me numerous
images from Newton’s herbarium collection in Manchester Museum, illustrating the actual
specimens of many of the adventive records detailed in the Appendix. In all these
ways, the book has been very much a collaborative venture. LM: I think collaborative ventures are often the best kind! But you mentioned herbaria
– did you visit many herbaria to look at specimens? Are herbarium specimens
particularly useful when it comes to bramble identification? And how on earth
do you press a bramble?
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Herbarium sheet of R. longiflorus collected by David Welch in 2020 |
AH: There is a good account of how to press brambles on John Norton’s website which also has
many photos from life of Hampshire brambles, some of the more widespread of
which grow in Scotland too. Dried specimens are harder to identify than living
bushes, and on the whole it is more helpful for beginners to build a
photographic reference collection, since the characters preserved in dried
material are often different from those observed in the field, although they remain of great value to experts.
An extensive photo
collection is being assembled of living Scottish brambles, as a complement to
the book, and it is hoped it will be made available online before too long. Photos
of northern English brambles by David Earl can be found here.
LM: Please keep us posted about that photo collection of living Scottish brambles, Angus, it would be very useful to have that online and accessible
to all of us! Photos are obviously very important when it comes to bramble
identification – and illustrations are always an important part of any BSBI
Handbook. So, what can we expect here, apart from the photographs: are there drawings
and distribution maps?
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Distribution map for R. dasyphyllus |
AH: There are maps for 55 species, showing the relative
frequency of records at hectad scale (10km x 10km). Recording is
inevitably patchy, and these can be no more than a guide to where the species
is most likely to be found. The maps are based on all-time records from the BSBI Distribution Database, and species will have been lost from some areas, and will
sometimes be found where not previously recorded. Other maps in the book
illustrate the severe losses of brambles (even as an aggregate) in most upland
areas and across much of the Highlands, while others show the
reduced level of species recording in the last 25 years (except for the handful
of counties where batologists were active).
The only drawing is the frontispiece
by Sarah Cowan, joint County Recorder for Clyde Isles, showing R. hebridensis.
LM: That is such a lovely drawing by Sarah, and of course it was used for the cover of Brambles of Scotland (image top right). And as you mentioned earlier, the galleries of photographs show the various characters needed for identification.
AH: Yes, each of the 56 main
species is illustrated by a collage of about six to nine photos, selected to
show the most helpful characters for identification. These were contributed by
many helpers, as explained above, and I am most grateful to them all. There's an example on the left - a collage of images for Elegant-petalled bramble R. polyanthemus. LM: That looks really helpful (and very attractive!) So Angus, all BSBI Handbook authors benefit from editorial support
to help them through the process towards publication. Who was on your editorial
team?
AH: Liz Kungu, BSBI Handbook Editor, with help from David
Pearman, steered the book into its final form. Earlier drafts were read by John
Crossley, Carol Crawford and Michael Philip, all of whom made helpful
suggestions both stylistic and typographical. David Earl read it with an expert
batologist’s eye, and as already mentioned contributed many useful
illustrations.
LM: You had a great team supporting you there. So finally,
once people have a copy of this Handbook they will be keen to get out and use
it in the field on some actual brambles – are there any events coming up this
year where they can do that in the company of fellow botanists? Are you running
any such events?
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Angus and a mystery bramble Image: M. Harding |
AH: A meeting
for anyone interested in brambles, whether already experienced or thinking
of taking up the challenge is being held this year over the weekend of 5-6 July,
based in Dunbar, East Lothian. I have never until now looked at a bramble in that
county, so I will be as much a learner as anyone else. Please don’t be put off
by the description ‘specialist, training’ - the meeting is for anyone who
wishes to come.
May I appeal particularly to anyone visiting Scotland (or a
different part of it) to contact me if
they might possibly think of taking a few bramble photos? I will supply some
guidance and any information on what might be of particular interest in the
locality. Getting Scottish brambles better recorded is our first task, and
photos are the way to achieve this! |
Angus and the team test the draft Handbook on a patch of R. scissus in Dumfriesshire Image: C. Miles |
LM: Yes, indeed and I hope people will get in touch with you Angus, even if they don't feel ready to tackle identifying brambles to species.
Readers, the important thing is: if you're going on holiday anywhere in Scotland and you can recognise anything that looks like a bramble, just take a photo and send it to Angus. Or email him before you set off to find out what to look out for and where to hunt. His contact details are on the Clyde Islands webpage so you can always get in touch with him.
Well, thanks for talking to us about the new
Handbook, Angus. As you know it's the 25th in BSBI’s series of Handbooks
for difficult plant groups. Brambles of Scotland has been a long time
coming but it looks as though it will be well worth the wait – many thanks to
you and your editors and contributors for all your hard work and thank you for talking
to me today. Before you go, may I issue an invitation to you please? Would you
be interested in giving a talk or a workshop, or some other kind of presentation, at one of our events later this year? Maybe the Summer Meeting in Melrose or the 2025 Scottish Botanists’
Conference in Edinburgh?AH: I am always happy to talk about brambles when I'm at a BSBI event, so the answer
is yes!
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Angus examining a bramble in Stirlingshire Image: M. Harding |
LM: Thank you! Readers should keep an eye on the BSBI website for announcements of where and when
Angus is talking about brambles. But for now, they will want to know how to get
hold of a copy of the new Handbook.
First, check out the Brambles of Scotland webpage.
If you are a BSBI member, there will be more details in the
Spring issue of BSBI News, due out towards the end of April, of how BSBI
members can benefit from our exclusive members-only offer and save £7, paying
just £13 per copy compared to the RRP of £20. The special offer opens on Easter Monday, 21 April, and those prices don’t include
postage & packaging. You will also be able to order your copy by following
the links on the members-only area of
the BSBI website (you'll need to have your password to hand – email us if you’ve forgotten it and don’t
forget to include your membership number).
If you are not (yet) a BSBI member, you have two options:
you will be able to buy the book soon from Summerfield Books and other natural history book-sellers. Or why not join BSBI
and start enjoying all the benefits of membership, including this special offer? Take a
look at our Join Us page which lists all
the many benefits of BSBI membership and there's a secure payment option,
making it very quick and easy for you to become a BSBI member and start getting involved.
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Angus in the field: the island on the horizon is Ailsa Craig, the most southerly of the Clyde Isles. Image: M. Harding |