Rambling about the Brambles

The crumpled-paper petals of the bramble blossoms are gone now, having been replaced by lumpy, multi-hued aggregate fruits in various stages of ripening.

The fruits are called aggregate because each surface lump grew from a separate ovary in the base of the flower. Each ovary had its own style and stigma, each one of which received a separate pollen grain to fertilize an individual ovule—or maybe not (more about that later). The result is a lumpy, fused bunch of “drupelets” that we call a blackberry (or raspberry). So the bad news is that a blackberry is not really a berry, according to the botanists’ persnickety terminology. A true berry contains many seeds in a single ovary. (A tomato--with or without Salmonella--is technically a berry. But calling it that in public will surely start an argument.)

Another bit of bad news, at least for those who care about identifying wild plants, is that there are at least 205 species of these prickly plants called brambles (Genus Rubus). All that taxonomic splitting is based on such picayune details that none but the most (resist inserting that rather crude Freudian term) botanist would even bother. It gets messier. As suggested earlier, some populations of brambles reproduce asexually, with seeds developing from unfertilized ovules. That can produce little local, cloned microspecies—and who knows how many of those there might be--perhaps thousands!

Don’t let this inane Linnaean rambling inhibit your taste for the wild bramble aggregate fruits—or from your brazenly calling them berries! If you can beat the birds and other wildlife to them, they are not only tasty, but are full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants like lutein and zeaxanthin for your eyes.

And what about that other BlackBerry ™, the wireless, thumb-operated e-mail phone device of Canadian origin? It took the people at Lexicon Branding, Inc. several weeks of haggling to come up with the BlackBerry name. That means that corporate committees may be even more anal—there, I said it—than botanical taxonomists.