Photo: Meggar — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 5 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Rich, aromatic, among the best-flavoured blackberries; deeply dissected leaves make it ornamental too.
- Hardiness
- Zone 5–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Leaf, Fruit
- Ripens
- Aug–Sept
- Mature size
- Vigorous semi-evergreen cane 2–4 m; tip-roots
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Wild origin unresolved. It is usually called Eurasian, but it is not confidently known from any wild population and Kew treats every European occurrence as introduced — the pattern of a long-cultivated bramble whose homeland has been lost. Reached the United States by 1860 and is now widespread and often invasive across temperate regions, including the Pacific Northwest, where it grows on moist, disturbed, low-to-mid-elevation sites, especially riparian areas.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Fast — canes make 1–3 m in a season
- Spacing
- 250 cm (98 in) apart — about 6.3 m² (67 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Distinctively deeply dissected, almost fern-like foliage — palmately compound leaves with leaflets further cut into narrow, jagged, deeply toothed lobes, unlike the simpler serrated leaflets of most other blackberries; it is the only blackberry in many regional floras with leaves this finely divided. Canes are strongly armed with hooked prickles.
- Root system
- A shallow, spreading root and rhizome system from which the plant resprouts readily after cutting or fire, combined with cane-tip layering — together these make it difficult to eradicate once established.
- Fruit description
- Black, shining aggregate berry 1.5–2 cm, ripening late summer into autumn — sweet and well flavoured, and the reason the plant was carried around the world before its invasiveness was understood.
- Propagation
- Tip layering is the natural method for the trailing kinds: bury a cane tip in late summer and sever it once rooted. Erect kinds sucker freely and a rooted sucker can simply be lifted. Root cuttings in winter also work. Seed needs a long cold stratification and is slow.
- 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
How it spreads. Spreads vegetatively by sprouting from the root crown and rhizomes after top damage, and by layering wherever cane tips touch the ground; seed is also spread long distances by birds and mammals that eat the fruit, and by floodwaters carrying broken cane fragments that root in riparian zones. It is listed as a Class C noxious weed in Washington State and is recognized as invasive in parts of the Pacific Northwest — less aggressively so than Himalayan blackberry, but still a concern in moist disturbed and riparian habitats, and its shallow root system can contribute to streambank erosion.
Grow journal
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