Photo: Simonjoan — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 6 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
A true blackberry — sweet-tart, good fresh and cooked. Better flavoured than most wild brambles.
- Hardiness
- Zone 6–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Aug–Sept
- Mature size
- Vigorous arching canes 2–3 m; ⚠ tip-roots where canes touch soil — needs containment
- Light
- Full sun to partial — best fruit in sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Mediterranean and temperate
- Native range
- Native across Europe — from the Netherlands south and east through the Mediterranean — and North Africa, including Macaronesia; widely naturalized elsewhere in similar climates.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Vigorous — arching canes reach roughly 3 m by 4 m at a medium-to-fast rate in a single season and tip-root readily, expanding the thicket further each year.
- Spacing
- 180 cm (71 in) apart — about 3.2 m² (35 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Pinnately compound leaves of 3–5 leaflets, green above and felted white with hairs beneath, on stout arching canes armed with broad-based, hooked prickles 3–10 mm long.
- Root system
- A perennial rootstock producing biennial canes, spreading by tip-rooting canes and occasional deep root suckers (down to about 45 cm) that let it regrow even after the crown is disturbed.
- Fruit description
- A small-to-medium, glossy black aggregate fruit with somewhat dry, small drupelets — aromatic and sweet, better flavored than most truly wild brambles, good fresh and cooked.
- Propagation
- By tip-layering in July — pin a cane tip to soil and it roots within weeks — or by division of rooted tips and suckers, semi-ripe cuttings in July–August, or stratified seed.
- Pollination
- PFAF describes it as not reliably self-fertile and best with a second plant for cross-pollination, though facultative apomixis lets isolated plants still set some fruit without one.
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. Tolerates poor soils as long as they aren't dry, and succeeds on both chalk and clay with little feeding; a spring mulch of compost improves fruit size in cultivation, but heavy nitrogen feeding mainly fuels more cane growth to keep in check.
How it spreads. Spreads both by tip-rooting — arching canes root wherever they touch the ground — and, to a lesser degree, by root suckers arising from as deep as 45 cm; together these let it form dense, spreading thickets that are hard to eradicate once established, so containment (root barrier or regular pruning of trailing tips) matters in a garden setting.
Growing tips. Vigorous, thorny, arching canes to about 3 m; the best fruit flavor comes from plants grown in full sun. One of the most widespread of the wild European blackberries and a documented genetic contributor to cultivated blackberry breeding.
Grow journal
Sign in to keep a dated log of when you planted, bloomed and harvested this plant.