The Colour Collaborative: December: Berry

And not a picture of holly or mistletoe in sight.

Of course, it's only right that this month's Colour Collaborative theme should be 'Berry'. In a dream Yuletide, snow would be on the ground (and branches). Berries would gleam, jewel-bright, from the trees. And yet this year it's been a wet - for some, disastrously so - and grey December. Not at all Christmassy.

We do have a big vase of holly in the house. It was scrumped 'foraged' one dark afternoon from a nearby lane. It looks very nice. And no doubt we'd have mistletoe too if it was easy to procure. There's a hook on the hallway ceiling which was just made for a sprig or two.

For me personally, I love berries (you only need to look back though my archives of photographs for the proof) not just because they're synonymous with Christmas. I love them because certain ones herald the approach of autumn. My favourite season.

I'd prefer the deeper red of hawthorn berries to the bright scarlet of holly, the blue-black of whinberries and blackberries and elderberries.

And although wild and native-growing trees and shrubs always get my vote, I do like spray of oxblood hypericum berries on the table. Once upon a time when I worked as a florist, I relished adding them to arrangements. 

I always try (and for the most part, fail) to capture the loveliness of 'snowberries' nodding on their bare brown stems. As a child I'd drop them onto the ground and listen for the muted 'pop' as they burst under the lightest tap of my toes.

There's something uniquely appealing about an absence of foliage and clusters of berries, little exclamations of colour in an otherwise grey landscape. It's the same with winter-flowering shrubs like wintersweet and hamamelis.

Spherical starbursts of velvety purple-green berries on fruiting ivy. Startling violet Callicarpa. Even those cultivated edibles: glossy blackcurrants with their evocatively-scented leaves which take me back to childhood summers, or the pinky-red wild raspberries which still grow in those secret places near the old railway line. 

Berries are not just for Christmas.

Don't forget to visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, just click on the links below.

Annie Cholewa

Sandra at Cherry Heart

Gillian at Tales from a Happy House

CJ at Above the River

Jennifer at Thistlebear

What is The Colour Collaborative?

All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.