Twining's Blackcurrant and Blueberry

Twining’s Blackcurrant and Blueberry is a refreshing, purple infusion which I was pleased to find in my cupboard. Curiously, among the ingredients list one will find mention of blackberry leaves. I thought this rather odd; including the blackberry fruit seems logical, on account of colour and taste, but the leaves of the horrid bramble? I spend time every year removing them and their rapacious, spiny stems from the chapel grounds, and each year, they manage to draw blood. Yet now I sip their flavours in my tea! A multiplicity of websites reel off the many and varied benefits of bramble leaves, which I shall not repeat here. The days are surely coming, however, when no thorns and briars will grow upon God’s green earth, but it in the meantime, it would seem that they do bestow some benefits: they wound, but they heal; they cut, but they restore -just like their Maker.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. Proverbs 27:6

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him. Job 13:15