blackthorns

Thank you to all of those who have suggested places for gathering sloes, the tiny deep-purple blackthorns with which I flavour my annual batch of sloe gin.

Nigel Slater's damson recipes 2011

He was spooked when it became narrow – it was so eerily silent – and they swam through a tunnel of choking blackthorns and weeds with long tendrils and he started to swallow mouthfuls of water in his panic, and to cough.

Polly Samson | The Man Who Fell 2011

It looked inviting, always, with lily pads and flowers blooming among the reflections of the trees, but it was cold enough to make your bones ache and further along it became sinister and weedy as the blackthorns closed in.

Polly Samson | The Man Who Fell 2011

The paths are narrow and you often have to duck to avoid being scratched by overhanging hawthorns or blackthorns.

A life less ordinary: Tobias Jones Tobias Jones 2010

I have no blackthorns here, but I have beach plums prunus maritima, that bore me a single plum this year.

a very long post about lots of things asakiyume 2008

In one corner where a field path ran from a stile down the side, was a stony hillock dotted with blackthorns and briars and all overgrown with nettles, and in the midst of it, sure enough, time and weather had broke open a hole as went down into the bowels of the earth beneath.

The Torch and Other Tales Eden Phillpotts 1911

The blackthorns 'blooms were faded around her, the hawthorn was not yet powdered with white.

Lying Prophets Eden Phillpotts 1911

On that day, however, I saw wavering strings of wild ducks flying south; and the little hedge-birds of different kinds were already flocking amiably together in twittering bands that filled the leafless blackthorns on the cliffs; -- true prophets, all, of that distant cold, gathering somewhere in the violet north.

The Maids of Paradise 1899

Once he paused to reset a hare-trap with a turnip, picked up in a neighboring field; once he limed a young sapling and fixed a bit of a mirror in the branches, but not a bird alighted, although the blackthorns were full of fluttering wings.

The Maids of Paradise 1899

The forests were leafless but beautiful; the blackthorns already promised their scented snow to follow the last melting drift which still glimmered among the trees in deep woodland gullies.

The Maids of Paradise 1899