Leaves

The leaves are large, green, palmately compound with five or seven leaflets. The flowering stems’ leaves are smaller, with three or five leaflets.

Flowers

The flowers are produced in late spring and early summer on short racemes on the tips of the flowering stems. Each flower is about 2–3 cm in diameter, with five white or pale pink petals. Bramble does not flower in the first year.

Seeds

Stem

The stem has a woody core & can grow up to 2cm thick. Usually covered in sharp, curved prickles. In the 1st year the stem grows quickly producing many leaves but no flowers. In the 2nd year the main stem doesn’t grow any longer and produces flowering side stems.

Fruit

The fruit, or drupelets grow in bunches around a central “core” and together they form an aggregate fruit, or what we call the blackberry. They appear and ripen to nearly black in the autumn after pollination.

Taste

Sometimes sweet and sometimes sour, best when it's a little of both

Frequency & law

Very, very common and not restricted.

The nuanced bit

The blackberry is actually a group of over 375 closely related microspecies native to Europe, north-western Africa, western and central Asia and north and south America.

Possible confusion

As mentioned above, there are hundreds of micro species of R. fruticosus so you may find a little variation in looks, but they are all edible.

Habitat

There aren’t many habitats that Bramble doesn’t like. Hedgerows, woodland, meadows, especially common on waste ground.

How to harvest

The leaves are usually out from early spring and you can find those tasty leaf buds most of the year if you look hard enough. The fruit can be picked from August to October.

Cooking tips

Fruit – Can be eaten raw or cooked and there can’t be many people that haven’t tried it. Leaves – This is one of my favourite foraging snacks. When the leaf buds are just opened, but the leaves are not yet spread out. Shoots – The very young shoots can be harvested early in the spring.

Other uses

A blue/purple dye can be extracted from the fruit. The stems can be used for their fibres to make twine.

Folklore

In the UK it’s traditional not to pick blackberries after Old Michaelmas day (11 October) as the Devil will have fouled on them. In Ireland a similar story tells of the Pooka urinating on the berries at Halloween.