In his Field Guide to the Edible Wild Plants, Bradford Angier writes that blackberries are "the most valuable wild fruit on this continent both in terms of money and of importance as a summer wildlife food." I view this comment, strong as it may seem, as an understatement.

The blackberry is indeed a summer staple for lots of wild animals. I have captured many species of Piedmont birds with tell-tale purple stains on their beaks and the glint of epicurean satisfaction in their eyes. Blackberries are even an important food item for a certain York bird bander (me, that is). I admit that I, too, exhibit purplish lips and roll my eyes heavenward when dining on this wonderful fruit.

I wrote in my last column that while a graduate student in Minnesota I often dreamed of summer days in South Carolina when I could pull on shorts at dawn and go out to watch birds without fear of being molested by killer mosquitoes. I neglected to say that part of that recurring fantasy revolved around the old brier patch, where my breakfast consisted of fistfuls of the sweetest and most succulent blackberries imaginable.

Now that I'm back in the Carolina Piedmont, Hilton Pond Center is a dream come true. On our 11 acres I've cut a mile or so of nature trails that wind around the property for optimal views of flora and fauna. It is not just coincidental that these paths weave between splendid blackberry patches, all of which are coming into fruit. Needless to say, I spend most summer mornings in shorts, toting binoculars and scanning the landscape for birds and the next choice blackberry.

While blackberries may please the palates of humans and other Piedmont animals, they are the bane of botanists. Taxonomy, the science of classifying living things, is practiced in two ways--by the "splitters" and by the "lumpers." Splitter taxonomists embrace very miniscule differences between very similar organisms, classifying them into as many separate groups as possible; lumpers, on the other hand, view most minor differences as individual variations that are not representative of a specific group.

If you talk with a lumper you'll hear there are about 50 North American species of blackberries, while splitters will say there are as many as 400. This is quite a disparity, but neither lumpers nor splitters are completely right or completely wrong; all may have perfectly logical and acceptable rationales for their classification schemes. (There are extremes of splitting, however, such as when a West Virginia taxonomist told me he could identify 2,000-plus blackberry species!)

Blackberries pose such a difficult taxonomic problem because they not only reproduce sexually by seeds, but also send out horizontal runners (vines) or sprout from the rootstock. When a blackberry patch has reproduced asexually for a number of years, the clones often look a little different from those next door--some observers might even call them separate species--but the offspring are genetically identical to the parents.

One thing we can be sure of is the genus name for blackberries. All of them are in genus Rubus--as are raspberries, dewberries, thimbleberries, cloudberries, salmonberries, wineberries, loganberries, and nagoonberries. In the Piedmont most ripe blackberries are black, and most raspberries are red (Rubus actually means "red"), but there are exceptions, and the best way to tell them apart is to look at the the base of the berry after picking it. If there is a large, even depression left in the fruit, it is a raspberry; if there's no depression or a small uneven one, or if the stem or sepals sometimes come off with the fruit, it's a blackberry.

And here's one last bit of taxonomy: Blackberries and raspberries are all in the Rose Family, as are the plum, cherry, peach, and apple. If this is difficult to accept, look sometime at the great similarity between the flowers of all these plants. Except for "unnatural" cultivated roses, each plant has a perfect five-petalled showy flower that is usually white, pale pink, or lavendar.

As a biology teacher, I think about these things on summer mornings as I stuff myself with blackberries. This doesn't diminish the the sensuality of the taste experience for me; rather it elevates it to the intellectual plane as well. While plucking and eating, I recollect that the blackberry isn't a berry after all, but rather a dense cluster of one-seeded drupelets. (The individual seeds provide an added bonus when you eat blackberries, since they tend to hide between your teeth and pop onto your tongue later in the day as crunchy but pleasant reminders of an earlier snack.)

Here are other interesting blackberry facts to add to your dining pleasure:

• Blackberry plants may show up in a cultivated field as early as one year after it is abandoned. The first year the plant only produces "primocanes," green stems that bear no flowers or fruits. The next year these same canes become soft-wooded "floricanes," produce berries, and die. New growth in the bramble patch comes from runners, sprouts, or seedlings.
• Briers are modified stems that protect blackberry canes from grazers who might damage them and prevent fruit production. In the genetic sense, blackberry plants "want" to protect their stems, but they also "want" animals to consume their fruits. Berry-eaters (or "frugivores") digest only the pulp of the fruit; the seeds these animals pass germinate some distance from the parent plant and propagate its genes. It is not surprising that blackberry plants pump huge amounts of energy into their fruits, mostly as sugars that attract such seed disseminators as Raccoons, foxes, Eastern Chipmunks, box turtles, and bears.
• Young blackberry leaves can be dried to make tea, and the berries can be used to make all kinds of cobblers, jellies, and jams. For winter consumption I prefer preserves, since they contain those afterglow seeds, but the fresh berries themselves are the best dietary supplement. One cup (200 grams) of fresh blackberries contains about 350 milligrams of ascorbutic Vitamin C--about three times that found in an orange. (Amazingly enough, nutritionists have found that fresh-frozen blackberries retain nearly all this Vitamin C for at least half a year.)

By the time this column hits your breakfast table, I'm sure I will have scratched myself on several briers, consumed my morning pint of blackberries, and ingested my minimum daily requirement of Vitamin C. If the sun's not too hot, I may follow that with another cup or two of blackberries today at lunch and again after dinner.

After all, blackberry season only lasts another three weeks or so, and I want my memory of Piedmont heaven recharged for another 12 months.

Back to Piedmont Naturalist Volume 1 (1986)