Bramble: thorns and berries across Europe

A September walk often brings you face to face with brambles, whether you call them blackberry bushes or use the older English word. My own garden is full of them too, thanks to a bit of accidental rewilding. ‘Bramble’ comes from Old English bremel, built on a Germanic root for thorny shrubs. Dutch kept it as braam, German as Brombeere (‘bramble-berry’), while across Romance languages we find French ronce, Italian rovo, and Spanish zarza. Celtic words like Welsh drysi and Irish sméar add another strand, and in Greek the classical βάτος (bátos) still names the same plant. The roots of the word are as tangled as the plant itself, spreading across Europe but always circling back to thorns and fruit.