Photo: Doug Goldman. USDA-NRCS-NPDT United States, NY, Tompkins Co., Dryden. — Public domain · source
Survives zone 3 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
One of the best wild American blackberries — sweet, aromatic, good fresh and cooked.
- Hardiness
- Zone 3–8
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Aug–Sept
- Mature size
- Erect thorny cane 1–3 m
- Light
- Full sun to partial — fruits poorly in shade
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Native to eastern North America, from Nova Scotia west to Ontario, Quebec, and Minnesota, south through New York and the Appalachians to North Carolina, Alabama, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Grows in dry thickets, clearings, woodland margins, and grassy balds.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Grows quickly — canes commonly reach 4–8 ft tall and 4–10 ft wide within a season.
- Spacing
- 120 cm (47 in) apart — about 1.4 m² (16 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Palmately compound leaves, usually with 3–5 leaflets (often just three on flowering laterals), coarsely double-serrate and rough-textured with scattered hairs above. Canes are red-purple and armed with stout, straight-to-curved prickles.
- Root system
- A perennial crown and shallow spreading root system in the top 30–40 cm, carrying biennial canes: each cane grows one year, fruits the next, then dies. New shoots come from buds on both the crown and the roots, which is why a bramble returns from root fragments left after digging and why it is so hard to remove once settled.
- Fruit description
- A true blackberry, thimble-to-oblong shaped, roughly 2 cm long, ripening from white-green through red to glossy black; the drupelets stay attached to the receptacle, which is picked with the fruit, leaving a solid (not hollow) center. Sweet with a somewhat spicy aromatic quality when fully ripe, and seedier than the aggregate European blackberry — regarded as one of the best-flavored wild American blackberries.
- Propagation
- Propagated by division of rooted crowns, stem and root cuttings, and by tip layering — arching canes root at the tip where they touch soil and can be severed and transplanted the following autumn. Stratified seed is also viable but slower and more variable.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile (facultatively apomictic)
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Prefers rich, fertile soil but succeeds even in clay loam or rocky ground; follows general erect-blackberry feeding guidance of moderate nitrogen applied in early spring, with less needed on already-fertile sites.
How it spreads. Spreads via both underground root suckers and cane tip-layering — the arching canes readily re-root where their tips reach the ground — so plantings build into loose to dense colonies over time and, once established, can be genuinely difficult to eliminate.
Growing tips. Fruits on floricanes (second-year canes). Canes are erect, red-purple, and armed with stout, straight-to-curved prickles. Grows in full sun to light shade and, unusually for a fruiting bramble, tolerates poor, rocky soils well. Generally hardier than most cultivated brambles with few serious disease problems, though it can suffer from fusarium wilt, cane and crown borers, and — as a wild blackberry — is a host for the systemic orange rust that red raspberry resists. Prune out spent floricanes after harvest and thin new primocanes to maintain airflow and control its spread.
Companion planting. A blackberry, and like most blackberries generally listed juglone-sensitive — keep away from black walnut's root zone.
Grow journal
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