This seems to be a bad year for red berries. You know… winterberries. Or deciduous holly.
Most of us are familiar with them. The grow along many roadsides and a lot of people take a short drive, cut a few sprigs of red berries and put them in Christmas displays around the house. They look quite nice and add a nice pop of colour. But, this year, they seem hard to find. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
Winterberries are an actual form of deciduous holly that is native to this area and like to live in swamps or damp spots like ditches. And not only do we like them, but many birds seem to like them too. But I don’t think the birds ate them all this year. There just didn’t seem to be a lot.
I have no idea if this is any sort of indicator as to what wort of winter weather we might have. I have no idea if a lack of winterberries may indicate an open winter, but I suppose we can hope. Just as I don’t depend on wooly bear caterpillars, I don’t trust random roadside shrubs to predict the weather. I did spot one wooly bear this year. At, least, it looked like a wooly bear. But it was all black. No stripes at all. That should indicate a bad winter. According to that one caterpillar, we should be buried under six feet of snow by now and stay that way until June. Thankfully, it seems that caterpillar was wrong.
Anyway, back to the berries. There doesn’t seem to be many around this year. There are lots of real holly berries, if you happen to have a bush or two in your garden. And there is no shortage of barberry berries, but using those as decorations is dangerous. Far too many thorns for my liking.
There also don’t seem to be a lot of the plastic version of red berries. You can usually find a few in stores, but they seemed to disappear fairly quickly this year. Probably because people couldn’t find them on the edge of the road.
I managed to find some actual holly in the garden, promised the birds I’d bring them back after I was finished and made off with them to use as decoration.
But usually red berries are everywhere. This year, not so much. Something else we can blame on 2020.
