Photo: Ivar Leidus — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Survives zone 5 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Few large drupelets under a waxy blue bloom; sharper and more acidic than blackberry — better cooked than fresh.
- Hardiness
- Zone 5–8
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Aug–Sept
- Mature size
- Low trailing bramble, canes 0.5–2 m, tip-rooting — needs containment
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.5 (lime-tolerant — unusual in the genus)
- Environment
- Temperate; calcareous and coastal ground
- Native range
- Europe and western Asia, east to Siberia and Central Asia; naturalised patchily elsewhere.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Fast — canes make 1–3 m in a season
- Spacing
- 200 cm (79 in) apart — about 4 m² (43 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Compound, palmate leaves of three (occasionally five) toothed leaflets with a slightly velvety texture, carried on slender, trailing canes.
- Root system
- A perennial rootstock producing new biennial stems each year, with the plant also spreading by rhizomes and by cane tips rooting where they touch the ground.
- Fruit description
- A small blackberry-type aggregate of just a few large, unevenly sized drupelets, blue-black with a frosty waxy bloom (giving the name "dewberry"); tender and easily crushed, with a tart flavor some consider superior to blackberry.
- Propagation
- Propagated by tip-layering in July (which it also does naturally), by half-ripe cuttings taken July–August, by division of the rootstock in early spring or just before autumn leaf-fall, or by seed sown in a cold frame after a month of cold stratification.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
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. Undemanding — succeeds even on chalky, alkaline soils and tolerates light, medium or heavy textures across a wide pH range from mildly acid to strongly alkaline; little supplemental feeding is needed beyond routine garden compost.
How it spreads. Spreads readily by rhizomes and by rooting cane tips, making a low, trailing groundcover — useful in a bramble patch but capable of colonizing hedgerows and rough ground the way it does in the wild.
Growing tips. A low, trailing (rather than arching) blackberry with slender biennial canes that root at the tip on contact with soil; grows in sun or semi-shade and thrives in rough meadowland and hedgerows on basic soils. The ripe fruit is soft and fragile and bruises easily, so it is best picked directly into a shallow container.
Grow journal
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