I find there’s a trade to be had in picking bilberries. You can go for tall bushy stands, where the fruits are bigger and possibly sweeter, while your back is less strained by the labour. But finding all those glistening beads buried deep in the tea-like foliage (which was once, incidentally, plucked and dried to make a substitute beverage in the Hebrides) is very slow work. Another option is to go for scantier, low-standing shrubs where the fruits are more visible and abundant, but often of lower quality. Either way, bilberry picking seldom entails rapid progress.
Another issue is the fruit itself. The tiny bell-like quality of each is strangely similar to the shape of the flowers appearing in April and May. One can seldom manipulate these near-weightless, 1cm spheres into your palm and then deposit them by the handful, as you can with blackberries. Nor can you position the bag and rake out with partly opened fingers the dangling clusters, as you can with blackcurrants. Bilberries are a delicate harvest.
There are compensations. One is the lovely misty sheen on each one, which somehow makes the softer Scottish word – blaeberry – seem more appropriate. Another is the calls of birds as you work: meadow pipit families piping into the breeze, or that single bagpipe-like note of parent golden plovers, which is possibly the saddest small sound in all of Eurasia’s summer.
A third pleasure is the purple stain spreading on your fingers, itself a kind of cartography of other fruit-picking memories. The occasions, 50 years ago, when we went bilberry picking with our mother, or when we picked Norfolk blackberries with our girls.
But behind it all is that wonderful realisation that you are engaged with the true heavyweights of our world. I’m thinking of the insects and flower-bearing plants that make up most of the biomass and genetic diversity on Earth. Both are always implied in the business of fruit-making. Most satisfying is the reflection that for every one of the thousands of berries picked and the millions left behind, there was a contract between a bee and a bloom – and an indisputable exchange of life.
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