Britain could be in for a sloe gin drought this Christmas.
Blackthorn trees are the source of the purple berries used to flavour the traditional festive tipple, but early indications are many of this year’s sloes may be deformed and unusable.
The culprit is a fungus called Taphrina pruni which causes a condition known as pocket plum. This leads to strange distorted fruit. The fungus stops a stone from forming and the sloe never ripens.  The ‘pocket plum’ name comes from the fact that the infected berry often ends up the shape of a shallow cup rather than plump, round and juicy.
The Woodland Trust asked its Nature’s Calendar volunteer nature recorders around the country to check on their local bushes to get a fuller indication of how widespread the problem is. The network usually assesses the abundance of berries when they ripen later in the year but indications of widespread pocket plum have led to an early sloe inspection.
Reports have come in from Scotland to as far south as Buckinghamshire with particularly nasty outbreaks in Yorkshire and Lancashire.
It is possible that weather conditions early in the year may have given the fungus a boost in 2016. Cold and damp conditions when the blackthorn are in blossom allow it to enter the tree and take hold.
Blackthorn was long associated with witchcraft, and it is said that witches’ wands and staffs were made using blackthorn wood. It has been used to make walking sticks, and was the traditional wood for Irish shillelaghs.
In ancient times sloes were buried in straw-lined pits and left for a few months to ripen and make them sweeter. A pit full of sloe stones was found at a Neolithic lake village in Glastonbury.
These days, of course, the berries are best known for their winning partnership with alcohol.  Ripe berries harvested in autumn are steeped in spirits with lots of sugar for a few months to produce sloe gin.
So fingers crossed this isn’t a disastrous year for one of our most highly prized wild harvests. In many areas, however, deformed sloes can already be seen rotting on the blackthorn trees.