Mainland berry growers experienced a poor harvest this year. Out on Vinalhaven, though, despite a cold winter and foggy, wet summer, the wild berries seemed plentiful whenever I went out with bowl in hand. Perhaps island berries are unfazed by weather. I do like to think that island berries are special. Berries out to sea are on a different timetable and tend to ripen later than their mainland counterparts. According to photographer Eliot Porter of Great Spruce Head, island berries taste better than any cultivated, commercial varieties (Porter also felt that berries are an island’s greatest edible gift).
Of the berries our islands offer, the blackberry is my favorite to pick. The blackberry plant can provide berries for weeks – this year I picked blackberries from late August into early October. The blackberry vine also seems able to grow anywhere so that new patches are continually springing up, at the edges of fields, along the road, or in other neglected areas. A particularly popular spot is among “blow-downs,” a tangle of spruce trees toppled in winter storms, a common sight on Maine’s spruce covered islands. In a maze of uprooted trees and towering, thorny blackberry vines, picking can be a daunting task, often requiring a complicated balancing act-standing tiptoe on branches and trunks, trying not to be snagged by vines. (Wearing a full suit of foul weather gear is one way to prevent thorns from tearing at your skin.) The challenge of picking blackberries makes a full container all that more gratifying.
Of the Rubus genus, the blackberry plant is a hardy entity, which perhaps makes it well suited to life on rocky Maine islands. The plant comes in three types: the upright (the Comanche, Darrow, Eldorado, Ranger and Snyder varieties); the trailing vine (sometimes called the dewberry, as in the Boysen, Marion, Young and Lucretia berries), and the semi-upright, which has traits of both the upright and trailing types. At least 50 of these Rubus species grow wild in Canada and the United States. Although a diverse, capable plant, the blackberry prefers to select its own residence rather than be directed by the human hand. Indeed, cultivated blackberries are notoriously susceptible to disease (particularly the “orange-rust” virus).
The Rubus plant has a long history of medicinal uses. Native Americans treated back pain, stomachaches, eyesores, and dysentery with tea made from blackberry leaves and roots. American settlers regarded blackberry vinegar as a remedy for gout and arthritis. Other cultures have used blackberry tea to alleviate whooping cough and bad breath. Today, we know that the blackberry (like other berries) contains cancer-fighting antioxidants.
My father often remarks that, “when picking blackberries, you never know where you’ll end up.” He and I once set out, with colanders in hand, on our first blackberry-picking venture of the year, hopeful about the season’s yield. We looked in our traditional spots, along the driveway and amidst the ledges in the field (often a favored locale, perhaps because sun-warmed rocks provide warmth), but we were discouraged to find only small, hard, sour berries. A spot with good berries one year may provide nothing in following years because of blight or vine damage (Rubus vines only bear fruit in the second year). Still hopeful, we traipsed off through the woods in search of new patches. We skirted a junkyard, scoured the edges of a dirt road, peering under vines as went (my grandfather always said that the juiciest berries are to be found hidden under the leaves in the right mixture of sun and shade). No luck. Was it the lack of rain that summer, we wondered? As we returned to our house, my father decided to “take a quick look along the stone wall.” Off he went. I watched as he leaned over the old wall, almost standing on his head in search of berries. A short while later he arrived at the back door, grinning, asking whether I thought his colander contained enough for shortcakes. Another blackberry picking venture; we had traipsed all over tarnation and found ourselves right back where we started. Indeed, you never know where you’ll end up when picking blackberries.
This summer and into the fall I discovered several new patches with plenty of juicy, shiny blackberries to fill my colander so that my family enjoyed shortcakes almost every night. A blackberry shortcake – sugared, mashed berries over a warm biscuit or scone, with dollops of whipped cream – is by far my favorite way to consume the juicy and crunchy blackberry. So highly revered is the blackberry shortcake in our household that we’ve been known to make double shortcakes (with two biscuits rather than one), served in a pie plate, as a combined supper-dessert. The double shortcake is quite a sight; one’s belly does feel a little distended though when full of that many seeds and that much cream.
Island friends tell me that they put blackberries on cereal, ice cream, and yogurt. I know some people make blackberry cobblers and pies, jams and jellies. A neighbor makes blackberry wine. Old-time cookbooks attest to other uses: a dumpling made from canned blackberries (considered the winter dessert of “country people”); a blackberry loaf, with pureed berries strained of the seeds; something strange called a “blackberry flummery”; canned spiced blackberry juice; a blackberry roly-poly. My sister Thena is perhaps the most creative in her use of the blackberry: she makes a blackberry-peanut butter sandwich.
Other creatures seem to delight in blackberries too. Hornets can be found drunkenly clutching the globes of the plumpest berries; slugs and snails somehow find their way past thorns to a ripe berry. On my island picking jaunts I’ve encountered raccoons; perhaps people on the mainland meet that berry-loving mammal, the bear. I’ve read that in the Southwest, tarantulas have been sighted rolling blackberries into their holes. But for me the delight of a berry has to do with more than the taste. It’s satisfying to pick something wild and elusive in an age when most of our food is engineered and presented in plastic packaging.
As fall progresses and the Rubus vines lose their leaves and show their red bark, I wonder about the most noted berry of this season: the cranberry. The islands of Penobscot Bay offered up many last year. I look forward to discovering what island bogs bear this October and November.
Jenna Webster picks berries on Vinalhaven.