Not so many berries

The Cape White Eyes are busy gorging themselves on their favourite food - the sticky orange berries of the coprosma. Of the five coprosmas in the garden, only one has even borne berries, so I must assume that the others are all male trees. Naturally, the most useful tree for the birds is the one that died in the drought last summer, and only the tips of a few branches remain. This means that there is only a fraction of the food supply this year and the birds will eat all the berries long before autumn arrives. The ground beneath the tree is brick-paved (all the other non-bearing trees are around what used to be the lawn), and for years the summer months were a time of scraping sticky remains of berries and their painful seeds off bare feet. This year there is no wastage and hardly a berry reaches the ground. The seeds sprout all over the place and there are always new plants coming up, but never in a convenient situation. They don't take at all kindly to transplanting and the intense heat tends to cook their roots in this dry, sandy soil.
The milkwood has surprisingly recovered after last summer, when I thought it had come to the end of its 45-year life - I was given the sapling in a tin when it was ten years old (talk about stunted growth) and it took a while to get established out in the front garden thirty years ago. On reflection, a good watering twice a week would have been beneficial, but it was on the other side of the existing fence, and we are by nature quite lazy creatures, are we not?
Thousands of berries scattered on the ground beneath its gnarled and fascinating branches, and many of them have grown quite strongly, but having a long tap root from a very early stage, they are also not pleased to be moved from their home of choice. It looks as though I will end up with sixteen in a pot at the gate! Two have grown very successfully in pots further down the garden, dropped by birds who love to feast on these purple, messy berries that stain everything better than any beetroot, and in time they will burst out of the confines of the pots and take their rightful place as fully established Kommetjie milkwoods - one of the great charms of this seaside village. I look forward to that.