Holly's up!

These days I only do greenery and it's nicer when it has berries. This year is the first for many that holly berries have been much in evidence. Only the female trees bear them and they need to be 'in a relationship' to produce, that is to say there has to be a male tree close enough for fertilization to take place. Ivy is much more profligate with its fruit, still green here but later becoming black.

 Both these berries are valuable for birds during the winter so I didn't take much. Collecting holly is a prickly business but that's part of the pleasure of going to the woods to get it in a brief lull between rain showers, boots clogged with mud and the dog straining at the lead after sheep.  Seamus said it better.

Holly

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.