Gardening at MONTY DON Fruity beauties

Now it’s the turn of berries, hips and haws to bring colour to our gardens, says Monty Don

Winter is limbering up around the corner, and soon whole days in the garden will be lost in a sodden grey haze. At such times berries come to the rescue. A berry is the seed-bearing fruit that follows the flower produced earlier in the year. Technically, strawberries, blackberries and raspberries are not true berries, while grapes, tomatoes and aubergines are. But we all have a pretty good idea of what we mean by a berry in the garden.

To get the best show of berries, you need to have plenty of flowers and allow them to fade and evolve into fruit. This means tolerating a degree of untidiness in plants such as roses, with not too much dead-heading. The fruit need summer sun to ripen, so shrubs that flower in May and June tend to make better berry-producers than later-flowering plants.

Of course, some roses have more spectacular fruit – known as hips – than others. Those on early-flowering species roses tend to be best of all. Rosa moyesii produces dazzling orange, bottle-shaped fruit and also has wonderful single crimson flowers that speckle the large upright bushes at the back of my Grass Borders in a curiously scattered but deeply satisfying distribution. I have other roses that produce spectacular hips, like the great tomato jobs on the rugosas, oval aniseed balls on the dog roses, black ones on the pimpinellifolia, and small dangles of orange on R. cantabrigiensis and R. willmottiae.

For me, hips have an unbreakable link with haws, the fruit of the hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna. The connection is botanical too, as hawthorn is a member of the rose family. Hawthorn is much used in the countryside to divide fields, and that is the best place to see the May blossom, but it also makes a really good garden hedge and birds love it. As well as giving you flowers and fruit, hawthorn produces the freshest green spring leaves there are.

Pyracantha is closely related to the hawthorn, and no member of the rose family makes more berries. The flowers are scented with a honey sweetness, and bees love them. The more heat and sun that the plant gets, the better the berries will be – which is why those trained against a brick wall produce a better display, thanks to the reflected warmth. The birds will eat them but not until they have stripped the hawthorns. I like my pyracantha to be orange-berried, and love ‘Orange Glow’ and ‘Golden

Charmer’, but P. rogersiana ‘Flava’ has delightful yellow fruit.

Another rosy cousin, and one I feel much more kinship to, is cotoneaster. It comes in many forms, from the tiny-leaved C. microphyllus to C. salicifolius and C. serotinus, which have more generous foliage. All will grow anywhere with good drainage, including dry shade. Bung a cotoneaster in against a shady wall and you will not go far wrong. Callicarpa berries are downright odd: purple, metallic-looking and growing in clusters along the stems. The shrub is not up to much really – although it has a pleasantly orange leaf colour in autumn – so the berries are the reason for growing it. It needs full sun to perform best and is ideal for growing in a pot so it can be moved into prominence when in berry.