Winterberries

Someone who lived here once planted winterberry bushes next to the stream. Overtime they had become overgrown. Two years ago we decided to give each one a good trimming. The first winter we were so sorry we did, because the few berries we'd seen in previous winters didn't come back. We began to wonder if somehow we'd managed to cut out the winterberry and leave some other woody shrub in its place. It wouldn't have been hard to do that, the plants were overrun with little sucker branches that seemed to suck the very energy from each stem. For all we knew another plant had set up residence and was slowly and surely replacing the old winterberry.

We had no choice but to wait for this fall to see if the trimming had worked. As November wore on we gave up hope on the scraggly bushes which were growing in way too much shade for any decent plant. We couldn't remember if there had been many flowers, and we'd forgotten to take pictures of the plants when they did bloom... if they even did.

Then one sunny day we noticed a small splash of red. There were days of cold and rain and then the plants were covered with little red berries for the winter birds to eat.