Winter Dogwood Berries

We've got two dogwood shrubs in our front flowerbed. One was deliberately planted by the previous owneers of our house many years ago. It has lovely red stems and makes white berries around December time.

This is the other one. It's self-seeded and turned up six or sevenyears ago. I have no idea where it came from, because it's definitely not the same variety as the ornamental one. Most of the year it's an ugly nothing-shrub, with plain green leaves, small rather ordinary clusters of white flowers and prone to being overrun by the bindweed that's endemic in our area.

Every year in November, it produces the most amazing purple berries. They're bright, almost magenta pink, and add the most amazing splash of colour to a garden that is mostly asleep in winter mode.

I pruned the bush quite hard arlier in the year, and it seems to have done it good, giving us the best display of berries yet. I'm assuming that being so brightly coloured indicates they are poisonous; even the birds seem to leave them alone, but they are incredibly pretty !

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