[Tweeters] Himalayan Blackberries

[Gary Bletsch via Tweeters]

Dear Tweeters,
Although I favor native plants in a passive sort of way, I will never bad-mouth the Himalayan Blackberry--if that is still the right name. I owe my life to Himalayan Blackberries.
In December of 1990, my 1971 Dodge Dart started sliding and spinning, doing 360's all over Interstate 5 in Tukwila. I'd hit black ice. After bouncing off a little subcompact, the car went careening toward a semi, which I somehow missed. I distinctly remember saying goodbye to what had seemed like a pretty darned good life up to that point. A moment later, I was sitting in the driver's seat, utterly unharmed. The bulb of a huge freeway light pole was slowly swinging back and forth right, a cubit from my window. I had clipped the pole, which landed on my roof, denting it only slightly. The front of the car had plunged into a huge patch of blackberries, which absorbed the impact of a 3000-pound Mopar going 60 mph. The frame was not bent; I just needed a new radiator and a few dents hammered out. 
Today there is a line of concrete barriers where that blackberry patch used to be. If I had hit that, I would almost certainly have died, or at least suffered serious injury.
At my old place in the Skagit Valley, we had huge, long thickets of blackberries. The goats and I had our work cut out for us, keeping it under control. 
White-crowned Sparrows and several other species nested in there. I don't remember exactly what birds ate the fruits, but many did, certainly including Starlings, Towhees, and Robins. In winter, I'd have all sorts of interesting birds sheltering in those thickets, including White-throated Sparrows almost every winter. 
Besides being my goats' absolute favorite food, the blackberries provided an enormous bounty of fruit, and blackberry pie was a major feature of our late-summer diet every year.
Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch
PS I did a birding trip in the foothills of the Himalayas a few years ago, visiting India and Bhutan. While I saw Cannabis sativa growing wild all over the place, I never saw a blackberry. Maybe "Armenian Blackberry" would be a better name. The Wikipedia article states that the plant is native to Armenia and northern Iran. 
 
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