Clean sweep

I noticed several small plants of Butcher's Broom today which may well have seeded from a larger plant nearby.

This strange shrub, a subshrub really, grows as a group of stems with very hard, sharp leaves, which in fact are really flattened stems and known as cladodes. A native of southern Europe - and southern England apparently - it was once used by butchers to clean their chopping blocks of all the gore after a day's work!

Ruscus aculeatus has such beautiful red berries which are almost a centimetre in diameter, in this form at least - I remember seeing great swathes of it in the Giardino Giusti in Verona some years ago where it was being used as an edging to the flower beds. Not in the front rank of ornamentals, as they say, but an interesting little plant nevertheless, which has the advantage of tolerating dense shade.