I have been cursing my heritage of late. Digging up blackberry and cursing.
Generally, I am reasonably disposed towards this galloping pestilence - despite its insatiable drive to colonise whatever uncovered patch of land it can lay its thorny shoots upon. And mostly this is because I recall with fondness an early childhood in which gathering its berries was a most pleasing ritual, and eating the fruits of this endeavour - blackberry jam, blackberry and apple crumble, blackberries and cream - more satisfying yet.
The autumns of our childhoods are often filtered through the soft focus of nostalgia, but mine on the West Coast really did seem a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness".
When the blackberries ripened we would take our pails and stroll the dusty backroads of Buller's Indian summers - weren't they all in yesteryear? - and pluck the fat juicy purple-black fruit, stuffing our faces as we went (one for me, one for the tin), our hands and faces stained with the crimson evidence of our endeavours until our stomachs and the buckets were quite full.
But I digress. Somewhere in the deep recesses of the family's history, the precise details of which I am unable to lay my hands on at present - most probably because they are yet to be assembled - there was an early horticulturist. He arrived along with a good many other chancers and prospectors in the West Coast gold rush settlement of Charleston in the 1860s.
Like others alongside him, once there Thomas A. Poole found an alternative calling. A contemporary, Robert Hannah, born at Kilrea near Belfast in Ireland, fetched up there in 1868 and promptly took over the Golden Boot footwear business in Princes St East.
He was 22. Six years later, evidently having taken to the business of hoofing the young colonial population he moved to Wellington and established R. Hannah & Co. His legacy is visible even today in our high streets and malls.
By contrast, Mr Poole's legacy is apparent in rural environs. More concerned with appeasing appetites than providing boots for miners and shoes for their young and growing families, he established a 50-acre farm on the south bank of the Nile River to provide garden produce and dairy supplies to the burgeoning town.
Among his plantings, so family lore suggests, was the humble blackberry - Rubus fruticosus - which, again according to legend, he introduced from the old country.
If it is true, then Mr Poole's notable bequest is both a blessing and a curse, though possibly more of the latter. It took a liking to the local conditions, spread like wildfire and was soon being declared by farmers "the most harmful weed in New Zealand".
And if, as Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand puts it, it was jokingly said "there were only two blackberry plants on the West Coast - one running along each side of the railway line" then my forebear probably planted them both.
By 1925, blackberry had become such a problem that the government of the day offered a 10,000 reward for a method with which to stamp it out - alas, in vain, as I rediscovered to my cost, and that of my blistered palms, when I spent a good couple of days last week trying to cleanse a bit of gorse and bramble-infected land.
I use the word "infected" advisedly for once in the soil, the ubiquitous prickly creeping weed becomes an infestation - an infestation that had certainly migrated north from the Coast to Golden Bay.
For those who have had little truck with this truculent specimen, the blackberry is the iceberg of the thorny creeper world. What you see above ground is only the tip of the problem. Each innocuous little crown of green leaf and purple stem conceals a triffid-like root system, bulbous in parts, thick, sinewy and directional in others, snaking for metres.
It takes resolve and persistence to remove it: sink your grubber deep into the soil adjacent to the crown and lever it back to hook up the offending root. If it refuses to give, take a gloved hand, reach down into the soil and pull, rocking back on your heels.
Put your back into it. Very soon you will find you have a patch of land that looks as if the pigs have been at it - and barrow loads of roots and greenery.
Not to mention an aching lumbar region and a curse-depleted vocabulary. Thomas A. Poole has a lot to answer for - and by the middle of last week at least, all the blackberry and apple crumble in Christendom would not have set things right between us.
• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) at the Otago Daily Times.
