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Fruit & Orchards

Strange raspberry-like berry identification

14 years ago

Hi,

I was walking yesterday in Upstate NY along Lake Ontario. I saw these huge, inch-wide red raspberries growing alongside the trail. I picked one off the shrub and it was extremely velvety for a red raspberry, with a soft hair all over it. It was sort of cap shaped, like an acorn's hat, wider at the base than at the top. Not thinking much of it, I ate it. It tasted fairly sweet and very seedy. But then I realized it was not the common red raspberry at all. The plant had five-pointed leaves, no thorns, and a fuzz on the stems. And they are fruiting very late; our black raspberries fruited a month ago.

The plant almost looked like some kind of grape plant.

Any ideas on what this was? Needless to say I didn't eat any more of the berries.

Â Red, cap-shaped berry, with velvet fuzz.

Â 5-pointed maple-leaf-looking leaves (3 pointed when they are immature)

Â Soft fuzz on the stems

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Comments (4)

denninmi
14 years ago
Probably thimbleberry, a common wild raspberry of boreal forests. It's very common in Michigan's Upper Penninsula, and there is a fairly big cottage industry devoted to gathering them and processing them into various products, jams, jellies, etc. Since the climate in upstate NY would be similar, I suspect that is what you've found. The foliage of a thimbleberry plant definitely is quite maple shaped, and they are not thorny. I've never seen the fruit, though, only the foliage and flowers
Awed
Original Author
14 years ago
Ooh close. I thought it was that for a second. Then I remembered it had large, purple flowers. And I found a page where a photographer labeled a plant both as Thimbleberry and as "Purple-flowering Raspberry" (Rubus odoratus). That fits more exactly:
http://www.ct-botanical-society.org/galleries/rubusodor.html
(No berries on this photo unfortunately, but they do look like thimbleberries.)

Thanks for the lead; it's fun to find a plant you were looking for!
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larry_gene
14 years ago
Your R. odoratus is very similar to the plant out West (and in Michigan), Rubus parviflorus, called thimbleberry, and that has large white blossoms.

Thanks for describing the leaves as grape-like; I find the thimbleberry leaves resemble grape leaves much more than maple leaves.
matthew18
14 years ago
I was at Jiminy Peak(ski resort) in Hancock MA yesterday. As we were going up the chair lift to the alpine slide I saw this plant all over the place. From a 10-20 feet above I just passed it off as a wild flower but this link is great to see the picture. That is/was precisely what I saw. Very timely post...thanks

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