Elsewhere on this website we have discussed babies being found in cabbages (Brassica oleracea), and on our Material Collected page we have examples of babies being said to be found in gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) bushes.  This note expands the discussion of the latter.

At present the earliest known reference, given in Iona Opie and Moira Tatem’s Dictionary of Superstitions (1989), comes from Notes & Queries, 9 ser., 12: 413  (1903), where it was recorded: ‘in Lincolnshire … children of inquiring mind are commonly told, when a baby arrives, that the doctor dug it up with a golden spade under a gooseberry bush’.

Later examples given by Opie and Tatem include mentions by Flora Thompson in her Over to Candleford (1941) and by Fred Archer in Secrets of Bredon Hill (1971).

In July 1975 a colleague at the Natural History Museum, in London, who complained that his gooseberry bush had produced only three fruits was humorously reminded that he could hardly expect the bush to be more productive in view of the fact that he had just had an addition to his family.

Towards the end of 1983 expensive hand-made dolls, known as ‘Cabbage Patch Kids’ were imported from the United States, where apparently children were told that babies come from cabbage patches.  The Kids had to be ‘adopted’ rather than bought.  In December 1983 Pearl’s, a shop selling a miscellany of cheap goods in Streatham, south London, displayed mass-produced rag-dolls, each labelled ‘Gooseberry bush doll, £2.50.

Image:  card posted Bedford, August ?1907.

6 March 2026; edited 23 August 2026