Barberry

Barberry is a thorny deciduous shrub of up to four metres. It grows wild from southern England across central and southern Europe to north-west Africa and western Asia, and has naturalised in northern Europe and in North America. Its small oval leaves, finely toothed, grow in clusters above three-pronged spines; drooping sprays of yellow flowers open in late spring, and oblong red berries follow, edible but sharply sour. The berries have long gone into jams, jellies and comfits, and in Iran the dried fruit, zereshk, is cooked with rice. Roots and bark were used to dye wool, leather and linen yellow. The shrub hosts wheat stem rust, which bears out the long-held belief of English and French farmers that it spoiled nearby grain, and a medieval French law barred planting it near grain fields. The Greeks, Romans and Egyptians used it as medicine, and Culpeper set it under Mars as a purge for choler. In medieval Europe it was believed to keep evil away, in England felling the bush was thought to break a spell, and Italians called it Holy Thorn, believing Christ's crown of thorns was made from it. In magic a dried root is worn for protection as a talisman, or several are laid around a property to drive off negative energy and draw abundance.