On Sun, 26 Jul 2009 10:17:17 -0700 (PDT), bobharvey
wrote in :
On 26 July, 16:51, "Dr Ivan D. Reid" wrote:

* * * * While we're playing this game, does anyone recognise this plant
that sprang up next to my cheery tree last year. *It's very thorny...
It's already as tall as me[165cm] and must have flowered when I wasn't
looking as it's now developing several berries which are turning red;
I opened one up today and it was filled with lots of mm-ish sized seeds.

http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/~ireid/waitawhile/-- ...

Looks like it could be Rosa Rugosa, a popular hedging plant with a lot
of varieties. massive crops of hips are popular with various types of
finches leading t widespread seed distribution.

I get very few birds besides sparrows and starlings in my garden
(the wood pigeons and crested doves don't call much since I stopped feeding
them with my Pringles bird-feeder (q.v.) and I haven't had a resident
robin since the unfortunate accident with the rat-trap). I saw a couple
of great tits once...

After the Great Elder-bush Infestation a couple of years ago, I
was ready to blame the sparrows for passing elder seeds in my raspberry
patch this year, there being lots of tall straight shoots amongs them
(despite never having seen a sparrow amongst the raspberries) but today
when I pruned all this year's fruiting canes I realised that they were
indeed raspberry canes, they'd just not grown that tall and straight
before (a quick comparison with a real elder reminded me that the leaves
are very dissimilar).

Snag is, the thorns and the stems look nothing like the couple of
hundred of them I have in my garding. Mine are almost hairy with much
smaller bristly thorns. But there are varieties, as I say.

Urglers are good at this sort of thing.

They are also good at getting Adny Woodwrad banned from Usenet, IIRC,
but we shall see. Thanks.

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. ] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".