Interview with Angus Hannah, author of BSBI Handbook #25: Brambles of Scotland

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.

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?

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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. 

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?

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?

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?

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!

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. 

Angus in the field: the island on the horizon is Ailsa Craig, 
the most southerly of the Clyde Isles.
Image: M. Harding