Blackberry, Bramble Rubus fruticosus
Dris
Native (D/E) (flowers from June to August)

Blackberries are deciduous or semi-evergreen shrubs with prickly and woody scrambling stems. New shoots are produced from the base each year which lengthen and strengthen during their first year, then flower, fruit and die in their second year. After that the dead branches provide a useful skeleton through which the next year's shoots can grow, creating a dense and often impenetrable jungle. Like the shoots, blackberry leaves are prickly and are divided into three to five leaflets, very variable in shape and size. Their flowers are twenty to thirty millimetres broad, white or pink. The familiar fruits, made up of lots of separate fleshy segments each containing a single seed, change from green to red and finally ripen to purplish-black. Blackberry bushes occur abundantly in Ireland. They have the ability to produce seeds without having to be pollinated and so each bush is genetically isolated and any chance change in the genes can give rise to a new micro-species. Over 2,000 such micro-species have been named and described, making the group a nightmare for botanists.

Mountain gorse, Western gorse Ulex gallii

Aiteann gaelach
Native (E) (flowers from August to October)

Mountain gorse is also a bushy shrub but is a smaller, darker green species than the previous one, less hairy and with smaller deeper yellow flowers. It can also be distinguished by having only faintly furrowed spines whereas those of U. europaeus are deeply furrowed. Its seed pods are burst open in spring. It occurs distributed along the Atlantic coastal fringes of Europe, from Spain to Scotland.

Fuchsia Fuchsia magellanica

Fiúise
Introduced (D) (flowers from July to September)

Many people find it hard to believe that fuchsia is not a native plant in Ireland. It comes from Chile and Argentina but has long been used here in gardens and as a hedge plant. It is easy to grow from cuttings, tolerates strong winds and will grow well even in quite boggy or peaty soils, making it ideal for western Ireland.
Fuchsia forms a bushy and spreading shrub up to three metres tall, but never a tree. Its bark is a light yellowish-brown and peeling. Its leaves are opposite, oval and toothed, about 2.5 to six centimetres long, with short stalks. Its distinctive drooping flowers are produced singly along the stems and consist of four bright red sepals arising from the end of a swollen tube and four deep purple petals from which protrude the eight long stamens. In autumn the fruits are black, fleshy, almost spherical berries 1.5 to two centimetres long.
The commonest variety found is var. riccartonii, which originally arose as a garden variety. It has fat spherical buds which pop when squeezed. A rarer variety, magellanica proper, has longer and thinner buds. Fuchsia does not tolerate too much frost and so is rarest in the midlands, east and north.

Information extracted from the Appletree Press title
Appletree Deluxe Editions: Trees and Shrubs
by Peter Wyse-Jackson. Appletree Deluxe Editions: Ireland's Flora & Fauna - Collection, comprising Trees and Shrubs, Birds of Ireland and Wild Flowers.