North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Heron Breen <breen@fedcoseeds.com>]

Hi All,
I went and tasted the fruits of the "Bangor" blackberry I wrote about a few 
months 
ago (see past threads) and it is delicious. Very mild and perfumy sweet. Even 
the 
black but not full ripe ones have no sourness to them. Thumb-tip joint size 
to 
middle-finger joint tip size. Knowing that these are indeed the heirloom 
blackberries in question due to its current keeper having recieved the plants 
from 
the originator's cousin 60 or so years ago now brings an interesting 
contradiction:
U P Hedrick trialed and rated "Bangor" in "The Small Fruits of NY", I 
believe, and 
rated as small and insipid. This berry is neither. Three possibilities are
1- The berry observed by Hedrick was not true to name.
2- The berry observed by Hedrick was affected by a warmer climate
3- The berry observed by Hedrick was mixed up with another one when 
collecting and 
reviewing data.

This leads me to ask whether we should be trusting older sources any more 
than we 
trust newer sources of reference. Newer soures of reference can be just as 
unclear 
or wrong, even with color pictures. (Recently this was proven true in my life 
with 
an attempt to identify the leaf type of Valerian, different books 
illustrating and 
picturing both palmate and pinnate.) Just because some older book says a 
certain 
fruit variety is awful does not mean it should be ruled out? Maybe we are 
using 
these 'histories' as guides, but I would have been a fool to ignore this 
blackberry 
on Hedrick's opinion.
What do you all think?
Heron Breen
zone 4, Maine