Wild Life
by Alicia Daniel

“Let’s go berry picking!”

In Charlotte August is prime berry time both at the berry farms and in the wild, where with just a bit of careful looking, you can find ripe blueberries, raspberries or blackberries. We are at the peak of cultivated berry growing, a season that opens in June with strawberries and lingers into October when the last of the raspberries succumb to frost. Wild berries often outshine the cultivated ones with their sweetness (and you can’t beat the price!), but for convenience and quantity the farms win hands down.
If you want to supplement your farm supply with wild berries, here are a few tips. Raspberries and blackberries are both pioneer species that come in after a disturbance and can be found along the edges of hedgerows and fields and in other open places. Blueberries are a type of heath, adapted to low moisture and acid conditions. They grow in with pines on exposed, rocky bluffs, in sandy soils and in bogs. Low moisture in bogs? That may sound oxymoronic since bog walkers often find their feet sinking into water, but in reality the water table rises and falls, and that, coupled with a shallow rooting zone (roots need oxygen), makes these environments prone to drought and seasonal fires. Blueberries are adapted to fire and are managed with fire where their growth is encouraged. People tend to have their favorite foraging places, which they may be reluctant to reveal. But it never hurts to ask!
That said, most of the fruits we think of as berries are not “berries” in a botanical sense. Botanically speaking, a berry is a fruit in which both the inner and outer ovary walls are fleshy and the seeds are distributed throughout. So blueberries are berries, but blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries are compound fruits made up of many small units called drupelets. “Drupes” are fruits in which the outer wall is fleshy and the inner wall is hard and bony. Other types of fleshy fruits include “pomes” like apples and pears, where the outer wall is fleshy, but the inner wall is papery. Think of the core of an apple with the seeds surrounded by sharp, cartilage-like bits. Still, knowing all this not even a botanist says, “let’s go berry picking” and means grapes or sumac.
So back to the “berries” that we all love, loaded with sugar and so ephemeral. The berries that are so enjoyable in summer are just one end of the edible berry spectrum. And let’s distinguish here: many things are edible that are not palatable. Except for special cases like kids and spinach, we rarely find ourselves having to eat things that simply don’t taste good to us. That is not true of many birds and animals in the wild. Given a choice most animals and birds will choose the same blueberries and raspberries that we covet. Bears gorge on berries this time of year until their scat is solidly packed with seeds, which they conveniently “plant” in the woods with a dollop of bear manure to fertilizer them.
Since it is true that plants produce fruits to encourage the dispersal of seeds, why isn’t the planet covered with sweet berries and lacking in others kinds? Sweet sugary berries just don’t have the “branch life” of some of the others, and summer lasts only a few weeks a year.
Naturalist Bernd Heinrich in his book Winter World, deftly tells the story of berries and seasons. A fruit’s nutritional content depends on the season for which its dispersal is tailored. He says that only nine of the 38 species of berries that grow locally ripen and rot quickly. Berries are either adapted for quick consumption (raspberries, blueberries) or to hang around to be eaten as a last resort (sumac, buckthorn). The highest quality and highest energy content fruits contain fat and sugars, but these (especially fat) spoil rapidly due to microbes. Low fat and sugar content, high acidity and low water content all help to prolong branch life. Staghorn sumac is an extreme manifestation of this strategy, with its tightly packed, small, dry fruit. People do brew sumac berries into a lemony-tasting tea, but I don’t know anyone who eats them. By contrast, in the middle of winter Bohemian waxwings will eat highbush cranberries, even though they are quite sour, because it’s what they’ve got.
So enjoy this sweet berry season while it lasts. And be grateful in late February when birds turn to eating dried up, shriveled buckthorn berries (which are known for their cathartic effect), and you can opt out. Not every animal or bird is so lucky, and some plants depend on desperate foragers who are hunting for berries in seasons of scarcity to disperse their seeds.

Alicia Daniel is a field naturalist who likes to celebrate her July birthday by picking blueberries in a bog.