Last year, brambles had the measure of me. For every bramble I lopped from its roots and pulled up, another three grew in its place. And three times faster than the previous one. It was like bramble-Hydra. Now its February 2018 and, looking out into the garden, it felt like a new season of bramble-based torture was already in full swing. Pretty much nothing is growing except brambles. The 3x20m mound that I distinctly remember clearing in October, was already choked with new growth bramble.

Something was going to have to change. Time for desperate measures. TRIZ-based desperate measures. Time to solve the bramble contradiction. I want to make it easier to remove them, but every time I try and pull out a branch, all of the barbs do their best to impede the removal. Here’s how the I mapped the problem on to the Contradiction Matrix:

Principles 1 and 24, it seemed, were already part of my bramble-removal armoury: one branch at a time, using clippers and wearing gloves. Principles 5, Merging; 25, Self-Service and 17 Another Dimension, on the other hand, appeared to offer up more intriguing strategy alternatives.

Self-service particularly so. If the brambles refuse to be parted from one another, why not use their self-sticking nature as a resource? Merging seemed to be a complementary idea: don’t try and take one at a time, take them all together. ‘Another Dimension’ took a bit more experimentation, but ultimately made the final solution into a small piece of magic. Instead of pulling-up, I tried pushing everything to the side: push the brambles sideways to expose the next bit of root, clip those roots, then move the pile further sideways. Repeat.

And hey presto, ten minutes later, 60 square metres of bramble were all self-bundled at the end of my mound.

You know, there might yet turn out to be something in this TRIZ lark.