RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IF YOU WANT DECENT BLACKBERRIES, PLAN ON SCRATCHING A LOT

In the world of nature, blackberry briers ought to be able to defend themselves, but they hire three-leafed thugs for safety.

Last fall there was what appears to be a brush pile between our driveway and our neighbor's yard. Being the proud owner of a 6-horsepower chipper-shredder -- its only match in the he-man world of gasoline-powered toys is a really big chain saw -- I offered to clean up the brush pile and turn it into mulch. The neighbor agreed.

But I didn't get around to the brush pile until this spring. As it turns out, the brush pile, which I thought was a heap of dead tree limbs that seem to gather in the yards in my neighborhood about as frequently as the flower-munching rabbits, turned out to be a mostly dead boxwood shrub. A really big dead shrub.

I had already dealt with some overgrown boxwood that completely blocked off the front steps down to the street in our yard. I became an instant neighborhood hero, because everyone else had been cursing that overgrown clump, which blocked the view of any motorist navigating around the bend in the street.

So I knew what it was like to deal, mano a mano, with boxwood, which is the Norman Bates of the shrub world. You remember in "Psycho" how twisted Norman's mind was? That's how boxwood grows: all twisted and gnarled. Which is why boxwood tends to do whatever it wants, no matter what a careful shrub tender might have in mind.

Dead boxwood, I soon learned, is a hundred times more stubborn than its living relatives. But with my trusty limb saw and a chipper-shredder standing by, I hacked and cut until the dead boxwood was a big pile in my driveway. I fired up the chipper-shredder and spent a couple of hours getting my revenge. Hearing the hardened branches being ground into sawdust gave me a feeling of -- what shall I say? -- of immense power.

Isn't that what power tools are for?

Underneath the old dead boxwood was a curious collection of growing things, just turning green in the early spring sun. Lots of vining vinca. Several starts of wild grape. A few infant oaks and redbuds. And a vine that looked like it could be a blackberry vine.

Actually, wild blackberries grow on thorny canes that are commonplace around here and throughout the Ozarks west of here where I grew up. We called them blackberry bushes when they were blooming and, later, full of ripe, black fruit. The rest of the year we called them briers, which were a nuisance and often had to be eliminated before they took over a pasture.

Sure enough, the tender plants soon bloomed and started putting on fruit. As the berries started to ripen from green to red to black, my mouth watered and my hands itched to take a few samples.

Actually, my hands itched because there is something else growing where that old boxwood used to be. Yup, just like picking blackberries in the Ozarks, you have at least four important considerations: chiggers, ticks, snakes and poison ivy -- not necessarily in that order.

Growing with the blackberries were some fine poison ivy specimens. Those berries will make a fine meal for the rabbits, not a snack for me.

This is the time of year when most every green thing I see and can't immediately identify is poison ivy. I consider this a prudent defensive reaction, because I am highly allergic to the virulent three-leafed vine. Suddenly, everything looks like it has three leaves.

When I was growing up, blackberry season was a pretty big deal. My city cousin used to come visit for a couple of weeks, and it usually happened just as blackberries were ripening. There were plenty of things to do -- gig frogs, fish for bluegill in the pond behind the barn, walk to the river to go swimming, hunt for quartz in the dry creek bed, explore the cave over on the bluff overlooking the old Doc Jones farm, cut hickory saplings into spears which we always planned to catch a bobcat but never did -- you know, the usual stuff.

But we always went blackberry picking. I knew some folks who would enlist the entire family for a blackberry assault. They would pick gallons and gallons of the ripe berries in milk buckets and wash pans and baskets. My cousin and I favored the small buckets that lard came in, which were not too big to make the effort seem overwhelming and not too small too fill a nice cobbler.

Every year I got a poison ivy rash picking blackberries. I could deal with the chiggers and the ticks. I thrashed the ground to scare off the snakes. But there wasn't anything to do about the poison ivy, except be careful. It always came looking for me.

There is no cure for poison ivy, except that sure-fire method of avoiding tigers. You do know that if you stay inside Toney's drug store all day slurping chocolate malts you'll never see a tiger, don't you? Well, it prevents poison ivy too.

The blackberries under the old boxwood between our driveway and the neighbor's yard are off limits, at least for now. I wonder what kind of gasoline-powered monster they make for eradicating poison ivy?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.